Memoire Online - Panmobilism and optimism in teilhardian humanism

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED AND PUBLICLY DEFENDED FOR
THE AWARD OF A DEA IN PHILOSOPHY

I wish to extend my gratitude to all those who in one way or another, far or near, have helped me achieve this research work. My heartfelt thanks go in a special way to my supervisor, Professor Godfrey B. TANGWA, who played the wonderful role of mentor. He is the one who initiated my first steps in scientific research and he is still the one who encouraged me to pursue this research on Teilhard de Chardin. His invaluable suggestions, criticisms, corrections and remarks enhanced the quality of this work.

Among those who offered me scholarly advice were also Professor Robert NDEBI BIYA and Professor Pius ONDOUA OLINGA who generously shared their knowledge and made invaluable contributions to the development of this research.

I am also indebted to my classmates in the philosophy department in the Faculty as well as in ENS who by their thought-provoking remarks gave me the impetus to firm up this work.

Special thanks also go to my dearest friend Clotilde BETYENG ASSOUM for her love and concern, for her encouragements, her moral support and for all her prayers.

I am most especially grateful to my entire family and to all my benefactors who provided me with timely and much appreciated moral, spiritual and material support. Special thanks go to Mgr Damase ZINGA ATANGANA, Serge and Paule NKE, Luc ONGUENE, Joseph ETOGA, and to Alain and Benoite ANANGA.

ABSTRACT

The central problem of this work is to bring out the link that exists between Panmobilism and optimism in the thought of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin which holds on humanism. In effect, we wanted to know if the panmobilist theory of Heraclitus whose ontology described a perpetual movement of things, still holds and if we had to reach his pessimistic conclusions excluding any form of unity in diversity because of the perpetual conflict of the instances of nature. We went through the thought of Teilhard de Chardin in order to find answers to the following questions: is the world still in progress? If that is the case, what would be the finality of this evolution? This is why our thesis is entitled: "Panmobilism and Optimism in Teilhardian Humanism." Panmobilism refers to the movement of all things. It all begins with Heraclitus who asserts that all things are in perpetual flux and in perpetual conflict: "You cannot step twice in the same river", "war is the father of all things." For him therefore, Panmobilism only introduces destruction, instability and conflict. As such, although he believes in the ever-mobility of things, a movement harmonised by the principle of the Logos, Heraclitus portrays pessimism in his thought just as Parmenides who maintains the immobility of Being.

For Teilhard de Chardin, the movement of all things, all civilizations, all cultures and all peoples is not a desperate one; it is full of meaning, full of hope and full of perspectives for the future of mankind. This is because Panmobilism has a goal, it has an end and this end is the Omega Point, the fulfilment of evolution. Instead of being pessimistic as Heraclitus, Teilhard de Chardin is optimistic and considers that all things necessarily move, they necessarily converge and they converge towards the Omega Point. Despite the conflicts which saddened Heraclitus and which it saddens us to see, Teilhard de Chardin invites us to keep on hoping in a better future because all these conflicts, all these destructions, all the hatred are a necessary stage for the advent of a civilization of the Universal. Even if globalisation in its present form seems to be a process of marginalisation and standardisation, Teilhard de Chardin's optimism invites us to consider that it is not yet the end of history, history will not come to an end with the Neoliberal ideology as Francis FUKUYAMA pretends in The end of history and the last man. Evolution continues more especially in its psychic form bringing the noosphere in progress for the building of a collective intelligence of which the Internet is already an effect.

Hence, Panmobilism and optimism are not linked by nature. They become interconnected in a meaningful manner only in Teilhardian humanism. His humanism is based on optimism, and his optimism takes roots on his metaphysics which is a metaphysics of convergence and totality, all things converge in accordance with the ancient panmobilist theory of Heraclitus. It is clear that Teilhard de Chardin does not use the concept of^@Panmobilism', but this concept best describes his metaphysics of convergence and totality. Above all, his all-out optimism calls for some limitations because of the complex nature of human beings. Humanity seems not to have learned from the miseries of the two World Wars.

RESUME

Le probleme central de ce travail est de presenter le lien qui existe entre la these du Panmobilisme et l'optimisme de Teilhard de Chardin dont la pensee s'inscrit dans le cadre de l'humanisme. En effet, nous avons voulu savoir si la these panmobiliste enoncee par Heraclite dans son ontolo gie du perpetuel mouvement tient toujours et s'il fallait necessairement aboutir aux conclusions de ce dernier, conclusions pessimistes qui n' entrevoient qu'un conflit des instances de la nature, excluant toute possibilite d'unite dans la diversite. Nous avons parcouru la pensee de Teilhard de Chardin pour trouver des reponses aux questions suivantes : le monde est-il toujours en mouvement ? Si oui, quelle serait la finalite de cette evolution ? D'oil l'intitule de notre travail : g Panmobilisme et Optimisme dans l'humanisme de Teilhard de Chardin. » La these du Panmobilisme affirme que tout est en mouvement. Elle prend corps dans l'histoire de la philosophie avec Heraclite d'Ephese dans sa celèbre formule du panta rei : « Tout coule 0. En effet, selon Heraclite, les etres sont en perpetuel mouvement et en perpetuel conflit. Le Panmobilisme heracliteen decrit l'instabilite et la fu gacite des choses qui sont toujours en devenir. Tout en affirmant que tout est en perpetuel mouvement, un mouvement meme ordonne par la puissance du Logos, Heraclite demeure pessimiste a cause de l'instabilite et du conflit permanent des instances de la nature. L'etre est insaisissable, et, aussi bien chez Heraclite que chez Parmenide, l'on sombre dans le pessimisme.

Pour Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, le mouvement de toutes choses, toutes les civilisations, toutes les cultures et tous les peuples n'est pas desespere. Il est plein de signification, plein d'espoir et de perspectives pour l'avenir de l'humanite toute entière. La pensee de Teilhard de Chardin se charge d'optimisme et au lieu de decrire un quelconque choc des civilisations, elle decrit une convergence panhumaine vers le Point Omega, le centre et la fin ultime de l'evolution. Ainsi donc, a defaut d'être pessimiste comme Heraclite, Teilhard de Chardin est optimiste et il nous invite a partager son optimisme mal gre les guerres, l'autodestruction de la planete et la mondialisation neoliberale qui marginalise, uniformise et liberalise. Il nous invite a penser que ce n'est pas encore la fin de l'histoire comme le pretend Francis FUKUYAMA dans La fin de l'histoire et le dernier homme ; l'histoire ne va pas s'arreter avec l'ideolo gie neoliberale et le capitalisme qui est entre tres recemment en crise. L'evolution continue, la noosphere est en progres, formant un monde d'intelligence collective dont Internet en est dejà un effet : la civilisation de l'universel.

Panmobilisme et optimisme ne sont donc pas intrinsequement lies. Ils deviennent lies de facon significative seulement dans l'humanisme de Teilhard de Chardin. Son humanisme est un humanisme rempli d'optimisme et cet optimisme se fonde sur sa metaphysique qui est une metaphysique de convergence et de totalisation. Il est clair que Teilhard de Chardin n'a jamais utilise le concept de Panmobilisme, mais nous avons pense que ce concept trouve toute sa signification dans une metaphysique oil tout est convergent vers le point Omega. Son optimisme a outrance nous inspire tout de même une certaine mefiance etant donne que la nature humaine est complexe et que l'humanite ne semble pas encore avoir retenu les lecons des deux guerres mondiales.

The war in Iraq, the ever-growing movement of terrorism, the crisis of Darfour, the crisis in Lebanon, the crisis in Birmania, the war in the Middle East, are just some examples which lead us to affirm that the world community today appears to be the amphitheatre where force seems to be the ruling principle, underlying relationships at the level of states, communities and international organisations. Rousseau's figure of the strongest, who matches all the others, or the Hobbesian image of the wolf, seems to find concretisation with the same characteristics in our post-industrial jungle of today.

When we take a look at our society, we can transpose the underlying principle of force which is at the basis of human relationships in the state of nature. Our world seems to be ruled by the law of the strongest and is therefore running fast towards its westernisation with the process of globalisation. To dominate and oppress others, in economy and politics as well as in all the other dimensions of life, appears to be the only rule underlying human and international relationships. The result of this will to power is the intensification of genocides, the dissemination of conflicts in the world, terrorism, or the invasion of some countries by others: the case of Iraq for example. This violence leads to the destruction of our planet and thereby to our own destruction.

We have already considered the notion of the Civilization of the Universal^I. This project of unification of mankind under the converging force of love leading the different civilizations of mankind towards the Omega Point, point of universal convergence, for a unity in diversity, begun by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and adapted in an African context by Léopold Sédar Senghor, entailed the complementarity of human races and at the same time a moral duty for each civilization.

During the defence of our Dissertation for the award of a Post-graduate Diploma in philosophy, we were asked by our Director what were our ambitions after the Maitrise. We then realised that continuing the research begun for our Maitrise was something crucial for our Academic Development. Following the encouragements of our Director, we have decided to pursue this research work, considering more especially Teilhard de Chardin's humanism.

With much more regret, we have realised that the world community today, seems to be running fast towards its westernisation with the advent of globalisation. Globalisation is characterised by the will to power of the North over the South, the Western World over the Third World. This phenomenon carries along risks of alienation and depersonalisation for some peoples. Under the Neoliberal ideology, the world is witnessing the domination of the Western world in politics, economy and even as far as culture is concerned.

With so much domination of the powerful over the weaker ones, with so much destruction in our world with wars, hatred, and with the deterioration of our planet through pollution and over-exploitation, is the world still progressing or has Evolution come to an end? With so many forces of destruction in our present world, is the Noo genesis of Teilhard de Chardin continuing? Why did Teilhard de Chardin remain optimistic towards the future?

As such, we would like to consider Panmobilism and Optimism in Teilhardian Humanism. In effect, Teilhardian humanism is based on his theory of evolution, his metaphysics. The world is in progress towards the Omega Point: all things are moving (Panmobilism) in order to converge and despite the time which it may take, despite the forces of divergence, despite the forces of destruction, despite our differences and our specificities, the Civilization of the Universal will take place (Optimism).

Indeed, we need an international ethics, centring the human person as a value, accepting the differences and specificities of all men, all cultures and all civilizations for a unity in diversity. This international ethics can find its roots in Teilhard de Chardin's humanism. Indeed, the moralisation of globalisation appears to us to be urgent for humanity today. We need to build the earth by spiritualising it with love.

In order to attain our goal, library and internet research is our method of study, together with careful consideration of advice, corrections, suggestions and remarks made by our Supervisor, our classmates and our friends. Our dissertation is divided into three parts. In part one, we consider the notion of Panmobilism in Teilhardian Humanism. Part two is an analysis of Teilhard de Chardin's optimistic attitude towards the future, despite the forces of destruction in our world. In part three, we set ourselves to evaluate Teilhard de Chardin's considerations in order to present the impact of his humanism in our world today. In our general conclusion, we are going to actualize our thesis by

presenting the need for a new form of conviviality in our world today which could take its roots on Teilhardian humanism. A select bibliography marks the end of our endeavour.

This Thesis for the award of a DEA in philosophy is the continuation of the research work begun for our Maitrise. In effect we have previously considered the Civilization of the Universal in Teilhard de Chardin and Senghor. The Civilization of the Universal as we had already affirmed is a type of humanism which seeks unity and harmony in the whole universe, acknowledging the differences of human races and cultures, while bringing them together through convergence. This convergence in the metaphysical work of Teilhard de Chardin enters in line with the panmobilist theory of Heraclitus, stating that all things are moving -Panmobilism - towards the Omega point, centre of the Civilization of the Universal. Despite the wars, the destruction and the hatred that he experienced, with the revival of racism in his days, Teilhard de Chardin remained optimistic towards the future. This is why we have entitled our Thesis: Panmobilism and Optimism in Teilhardian Humanism. As such, we are concerned with Teilhard de Chardin's humanism which is based on the panmobilist theory and which is characterised by optimism.

As Julian HUXLEY tells us in the introduction to The Phenomenon of Man, the life of Pere Teilhard de Chardin help to illuminate the development of his thought. It is not without any importance for us to go back to the life of this author in order to see how his thought is influenced by his life experiences.

His father was a landowner in Auvergne, a farmer and an archivist, with a taste for natural history. Marie-Joseph Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was born in I88I, the fourth in a family of eleven. He studied in the Jesuit College of Mongre near Lyon where he became devoted to geology and mineralogy. When eighteen years old, he

decided to become a Jesuit, and entered their order. At the age of twenty-four, after an interlude in Jersey mainly studying philosophy, he was sent to teach physics and chemistry in the Jesuit College at Cairo. In the course of his three years in Egypt, and a further four studying theology in Sussex, he acquired real competence in geology and palaeontology; and before being ordained priest in I9I2, a reading of Bergson's Evolution Créatrice had helped to inspire in him a profound interest in the general facts and theories of evolution.

His philosophical thought is based on humanism. He considered the philosophical problem of the One and the Many which Plato examined in the Parmenides from the point of view of the interaction of human races. Teilhard de Chardin is the philosopher of synthesis and unity. His philosophy concerns the union that will make humanity a harmonious fusion of civilizations by intellectual, moral and spiritual improvements. He explains this coming together of civilizations by saying that the most humanized human groups always appear as the product of a synthesis, not segregation.

His thought was adopted and adapted by Leopold SEDAR SENGHOR (I906- 200I). Sen ghor was fascinated by the writings of Teilhard de Chardin and followed his steps on humanism, considering the role that Africa is called to play in the Civilization of the Universal. Sen ghor makes of Teilhardian ideas on culture a dominant principle in his work. Culture, in some ways, determines all the themes that he developed and all are directly or indirectly linked to this central notion. He straightforwardly militates for the Civilization of the Universal expressed by Teilhard de Chardin, whose first vision held the seeds of humanism.

INTRODUCTION

Teilhard de Chardin has never used the concept of Panmobilism; but when we consider his metaphysics, a metaphysics of convergence, we observe that it perfectly abide to this theory that holds that all things are in movement. As a palaeontologist, a geologist, a theologian and a philosopher, Teilhard de Chardin proves to be a man of science. His great scientific spirit which accepted the complexity of our world and the complexity of human relationships, enabled him to foresee that all human races, all cultures, all civilizations, were coming up together through convergence. His scientific investigations lead him, though he had not received a great philosophical formation, to consider some philosophical problems and to stand out as a great philosopher of the future. This is what Paul-Bernard GRENET asserts when he says:

K Un grand esprit qui ne voulait faire que de la science fut contraint, par l'universalite meme de cette science, de poser des problemes qui etaient philosophiques, de parler un langage philosophique. Comme sa connaissance de la technique philosophique etait sommaire, il passa aux yeux de plusieurs, qui etaient ses juges par fonction, ou qui userent des droits de tout lecteur a porter un jugement pour un maitre de mauvaise philosophie. Comme son information scientifique etait immense, ses dons de cmur inepuisables, le lyrisme de son expression prestigieux, il passa aux yeux de plusieurs autres pour le seul maitre de la philosophie de l'avenir. »I

In effect, Teilhard de Chardin affirmed that the general movement of civilizations was drawing them towards a panhuman convergence. In his writings, he presents how civilizations are called to come together in synthesis in order to unite in the Omega Point, the centre of all civilizations. Throughout his metaphysical considerations, he maintains the idea of totality, defending the complementarity and mutual duty of human races in the process of collectivisation of mankind.

^I Paul-Bernard Grenet, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin ou le philosophe malgré lui, Paris, I960, p.5: He was a great spirit who engaged in science and because of the universality of this science; he was bound to posit philosophical questions and to speak in a philosophical language. Because his knowledge of philosophical technique was not developed, he was considered by some as a master of wrong philosophy and because his scientific information was so great, he was considered by many others as the only master of the philosophy of the future.

Panmobilism is the theory that holds that everything - pan - is in movement - mobilism -. It appears more explicitly with Heraclitus when he affirms that things are in perpetual change and that for this reason, one cannot step in the same river twice. If we seek to discover what Teilhard de Chardin regarded as a central and fundamental problem, we have some indications that the starting point of his philosophical thought was the same as that treated by Plato in the Parmenides: the relation between the One and the Many. Thus, Cuenot affirms in the following words:

In his Sketch of a Personal Universe, he wrote: "Plurality and unity: the one problem to which in the end all physics, all philosophy, and all religion, come back."^'

The problem of the One and the Many had been grappled with throughout the history of philosophy and it lies at the basis of Teilhard de Chardin metaphysics. The panhuman convergence, "creative union", is the theory that accepts the conciliation of the One and the Multiple as Wolfgang SMITH puts it:

In the present evolutionary phase of the cosmos (the only phase known to us), everything happens as though the One were formed by successive unifications of the Multiple. 1...] This does not mean that the One is compose of the Multiple i.e., that it is born from the fusion in itself of the elements it associates 1...] The One appears in the wake of the Multiple, dominating the Multiple since its essential and formal act is to unite².

^I Claude Cuenot, Teilhard de Chardin, London, I965, p. 377. ^'Wolfgang Smith, Teilhardism and the New Religion, USA, I988, p. 66.

Teilhard de Chardin saw that convergence brought together the One and the Many, the One being born from the concentration of the Many. Within a universe which is structurally convergent, the only possible way for one element to draw closer to the other neighbouring elements is by driving towards the point of universal convergence. He calls it the Omega Point. According to him, everything begins in multiplicity and converges towards an ever greater unity. And yet, it is clear that even the most elementary observations disclose just the opposite. The fertilized ovum for example, which looks like a sphere or tiny globule, divides and subdivides, creating a spherical immensity of cells. Then the cells begin to divide themselves, giving rise to a multiplicity of layers, tissues, and organs. The entire movement appears to be in the direction of increasing multiplicity. But Teilhard de Chardin seems to be convinced that things invariably move in the opposite direction: first multiplicity, then unity. For him, not only do all things begin in multiplicity, but it is multiplicity that unites them.

1.1. Heraclitus and the law of perpetual change

The date of Heraclitus' birth or death is unknown, but we know that he reached the peak of his fame around 505-500 BC, during the period of Ionian anti-Persian activity. His homeland, Ephesus, was involved in the political turbulence, provoking the philosopher's anger and causing him to accuse political leaders of abdicating leadership to masses. His attacks were also directed at earlier poets and thinkers, such as Hesiod, Homer, Pythagoras and Xenophanes. His pride can be seen in his frequent use of the pronoun "I" in his fragments and his open declaration of independence from any teacher. However, it would be an exaggeration to negate the presence of earlier doctrines in his thought, for example, Anaximander's philosophy.

This aristocratic thought was accompanied by pessimism; hence, his entire philosophical conception is dominated by a profound sense of reality's ephemeral fragility. Heraclitus expounded his thought in a prose work entitled On the universe. From this work, we can have an impressive picture of the universe. Its first feature and

that which was afterwards taken to be the distinguishing mark of Heracliteanism is the passionate and eager acceptance of change as the law of being: "you cannot step twice into the same river". All things, for Heraclitus are in perpetual flux and change; nowhere in the universe is to be found eternal rest, unchanging stability. And not only is there perpetual change, but also perpetual conflict: war is the father of all things.

In effect, the clash of opposites is the very condition of life. Evil and good, hot and cold, wet and dry and the rest are each other's necessary complements and the endless strife between them is the sum of existence. The only harmony possible is a harmony of conflict and contrast, a counter-pulling harmony of conflict like that of a bow or a lyre. Also, to the corresponding Pythagorean "taking sides" between the opposites, exalting good over evil, light over dark, male over female, Heraclitus considers that the two members of every pair are indivisible and equally natural and necessary; one without the other is impossible. All things are in movement, they are in perpetual flux and they are governed by the law of becoming: good becomes evil and evil becomes good, hot becomes cold and cold becomes hot, wet becomes dry and dry becomes wet, and so on.

This world of perpetual change and perpetual conflict pictured by Heraclitus is not however a mere chaos. It is governed by an immanent principle of order and measure. Heraclitus speaks of its work sometimes in mythological terms. "Justice" and her ministers the "Furies" keep the "Opposite" or the heavenly bodies within their due bounds. But his name for the ruling principle is the Logos. It makes its first appearance in philosophy with Heraclitus and he is the first to give it that peculiar and very profound meaning which later made it so valuable for expressing the Christian revelation.

The Logos of Heraclitus is the universal proportion of the mixture, the law or principle of measure and just order which effects the harmony of opposing tensions. But the Logos is law because it is a living all-ruling intelligence which seems to be in

some way identified with the ever-living Fire which is the stuff of the universe, the thunderbolt which tears everything. This fire is not identical with the visible and elemental fire that we know and is ever-living, not immortal, for it is in turn transformed into all things and all things into it. This transformation of all things into each other according to the living divine law which somehow persists when the Logos-Fire itself is transformed, is a cyclic, ever-recurring process, the way up and down. The Logos is the principle of life and intelligence to men, but they have the choice of shutting themselves up in their private worlds of ignorance and stupidity or to opening themselves to universal Logos and the unbound depth of its wisdom.

Thus, the Logos is for Heraclitus a universal principle which is the cause of order, proportion, balance, harmony and rationality in the continual flow of being and is at the same time vividly alive. It is this union of life and rationality in the continual single concept of the Logos which is one of Heraclitus' great contributions to our traditional inheritance of thought. The other, and this is what we are mostly concerned with, is his extraordinary vivid intuition of the nature of the world in which we live: a world in which things are subject to the law of perpetual change, and die continually into each other's life, and in which the only possible harmony is a delicate and precarious tension of opposing stresses; but a world which is no mere chaos but one and governed by a living law: the Logos. It is a view of the world of time and change which has been accepted by later and greater thinkers who looked beyond it to a transcendent and eternal world of the spirit.

We clearly see the seeds of Teilhardian Panmobilism from the thought of Heraclitus. Things are in perpetual movement, humanity is in progress towards Hominisation. There is a panhuman convergence of all races, all civilizations, all cultures, all peoples and this planetary movement is not in a mere chaos. Peoples are moving together towards the Omega point, centre of all civilizations, point of universal convergence, centre of the Civilization of the Universal. The Heraclitean Logos can find its best expression under the Teilhardian Omega Point.

1.2. The problem of the One and the Many in Plato's Parmenides

The first half of the Parmenides is a critique of the theory of forms. The main characters of the dialogue are Socrates who was then quite young, Zeno who was nearing forty, and Parmenides who was well advanced in years. Zeno has just presented his argument that if there is a plurality of entities; they must be both like and unlike, which is impossible. The young Socrates replies that there is really nothing so absurd in the coincidence of opposites in sensible objects, for that happens all the time. What would really be amazing, Socrates suggests, is if there were such contradiction in the realm of the intelligible forms. At this point, Parmenides begins to question Socrates about the forms. The young Socrates answers that he believes that forms exist apart from the instances that share in them, and they provide unique patterns for things. This is the standard doctrine of the forms as presented in the Phaedo and the Republic.

With this admission by the young Socrates, Parmenides then begins a lengthy and thorough critique of this doctrine, showing all the various problems and contradictions that result from holding that the forms exist apart from each other and from sensible things. The last, and perhaps worst, of the problems is that if the forms exist in the realm of being apart from the changing objects of the sensible world, then there can be no intelligible relation between the two. Consequently, we cannot know the forms. In addition, even if there were supersensible gods who could know the forms, they could not know us or the world of sensible objects. Parmenides thus shows that the theory of forms, at least on the face of it, is not intelligible. Yet, he goes on to admit that the forms are necessary:

These difficulties and many more besides are inevitably involved in the forms, if these characters of things really exist and one is going to distinguish each form as a thing just by itself. The result is that the hearer is perplexed and inclined either to question their existence, or to contend that, if they do exist, they must certainly be unknowable by our human nature...But on the other hand, (Parmenides continued), if, in view of all these difficulties and others like them, a man refuses to admit that forms of things exist or to

distinguish a definite form in every case, he will have nothing on which to fix his thought, so long as he will not allow that each thing has a character which is always the same, and in so doing he will completely destroy the significance of all discourse.^'

At this point in the dialogue, the young Socrates is at a total loss. Parmenides has decisively demolished the theory of forms, or at least Socrates' understanding of it. Yet, without the forms, there is no possibility of any intelligible thought or discourse whatsoever, and our minds will become a Heraclitean flux of perpetually changing contradictions. At this point of aporia, Parmenides explains to the young Socrates where he went wrong:

You are undertaking to define `beautiful,' `just,'`good,' and other particular forms, too soon, before you have had a preliminary training...You must make an effort and submit yourself, while you are still young, to a severer training in what the world calls idle talk and condemns as useless. Otherwise, truth will escape you.^'

The young Socrates is in trouble because he has been reasoning about the forms as unquestioned axioms. In order to see the true nature of the forms, Socrates must train himself in dialectic and question the very nature of the forms themselves. Parmenides elaborates on the manner of dialectical exercise as follows:

If you want to be thoroughly exercised, you must not merely make the supposition that such and such a thing is and then consider the consequences; you must also take the supposition that that same thing is not...In a word, whenever you suppose that anything whatsoever exists or does not exist or has any other character, you ought to consider the consequences with reference to itself and to any one of the other things that you may select, or several of them, or all of them together, and again you must study these others with reference both to one another and to any one thing you may select, whether you have assumed the thing to exist or not to exist, if you are really going to make

out the truth after a complete course of discipline...Most people are unaware that you cannot hit upon truth and gain understanding without ranging in this way over the whole field.^I

With this prelude, Parmenides then proceeds with an illustration of the dialectical exercise, taking as his supposition the One.

The second half of the Parmenides is essentially a monologue by Parmenides. Based on what was stated in the first half of the dialogue, we can expect Parmenides to range over the whole field and hit upon the truth of the One. Based on the historical background, as well as the discussion of the forms in the first half, we can also expect this exercise to illuminate the nature of the forms and their relation to the sensible world.

The dialectical exercise is naturally divided into eight parts. For each of the two hypotheses, if the One is and if the One is not, we examine the consequences for the One, and the consequences for the Others. This alone would give four parts. Plato, however, adds a subtle but very important distinction to the exercise after it is started. He distinguishes between the One which has being and the bare One. There are then a total of eight hypotheses:

Hypothesis	If...	Consequences for...	Results
I	One	the One	negative
II	One is	the One	positive
III	One is	the Others	positive
IV	One	the Others	negative
V	One is not	the One	positive
VI	not One	the One	negative
VII	One is not	the Others	positive
VIII	not One	the Others	negative

The results of the hypotheses follow a general pattern. In the case of hypotheses II, III, V, VII that predicate being of the One (or of the not One), the results deduced by Parmenides are positive. In these cases, predication is possible and positive statements are made of the One or of the not One. In the case of hypotheses I, IV, VI, VIII that do not predicate being of the One or of the not One, the results deduced by Parmenides are negative. In these cases, predication is not possible and nothing may be asserted of the subject.

The One of the first Hypothesis excludes any sort of diversity. Thus, it even excludes being, since if it had being it would have multiple parts. It is not, therefore, something- on - which is one. It is just 'one' and nothing else. In no way does the one have a share of being. Moreover, there can be no name for it, no reasoning about it, no knowledge or perception of it, and no opinion of it. The bare One is thus unutterable and ineffable. Asserting even this much, however, is saying too much.

This hypothesis demonstrates that from the bare One which negates all plurality, nothing can be deduced or evolved. It is interesting to observe at this point that the historical Parmenides, who asserted the absolute unity and indivisibility of the One, was logical in so far as he deduced that there could be no 'Others', no plurality of real things, and no world of sensible appearances. But he was not justified when he gave to his One various other attributes. As Plato has here shown, the true One cannot even exist or be the object of any kind of knowledge.^I Thus, the bare One cannot give rise to the Pythagorean evolution, starting from this original One and leading to the sensible world.

In the second hypothesis, Plato shows that 'the One' admits positive statements about it if we add to its oneness some sort of bein g.² Moreover, Plato derives the existence of number from the Parmenidean hypothesis of the One, provided this hypothesis is understood as positing a One that is not just one but also has being. Plato

^I Francis Comford, Plato and Parmenides: Parmenides' Way of Truth and Plato's Parmenides, Indianapolis, I939, p.203.

thus revives the Pythagorean evolution of numbers from the One.^I Starting from this notion of a One which has being associated with it, Plato shows that such a One, just because it is not absolutely one, can have some attributes which Parmenides denied of the One, in particular, number.² Thus, the existence of a manifold and changing world is not a self-contradictory illusion of mortals, as Parmenides had said. Rather, reasoning can take us all the way from Parmenides' own hypothesis of a One which has being to the notion of the sensible body with contrary qualities. Plato thus justifies in this hypothesis the Pythagorean evolution, starting from the Monad and ending with the sensible body.³

Because the remaining Hypotheses are of less interest than the first two, we will only remark on some of them briefly. In Hypothesis III it is shown that the One Being need not be unique, as Parmenides had claimed, i.e., that there may be others with being. Hypothesis V shows that negative predication is possible.⁴ It refutes Parmenides' claim that nothing can be said about 'what is not', because we know what we are speaking of when speaking of a non-existent thing. Plato also refutes the claim that coming into existence is impossible because there can be nothing that could come into existence.⁵ In contrast with Hypothesis V, which is concerned with something that is an entity but does not exist, Hypothesis VI is concerned with a nonentity. In this hypothesis the 'One' is stripped even of all being. It is no longer a non-existent entity, but a nonentity. By distinguishing these two concepts, Plato corrects Parmenides' conflation of the two.⁶

Hypothesis VII and Hypothesis VIII are concerned with the consequences for the Others of the negative supposition that 'there is no One'. The Hypothesis 'if there is no One' can be taken to mean 'suppose that there exists nothing that can be called "one

⁴ Robert Turnbull, The Parmenides and Plato's Late Philosophy, Toronto, I998, p. I24.

thing" (en)'. We can then inquire whether there is anything that, without being 'one thing' can nevertheless have some sort of existence. Alternatively, we can understand 'if there is no One' to mean: 'suppose that no one thing has any sort of being', where we take 'one thing' as equivalent to 'an entity'. If there is no such thing as 'an entity', then there is not only no 'One' but no 'Others'; in fact, there is nothing at all.^I

1.3. Cosmopolitism and the question of universality in plurality

Cosmopolitism is coined from two Greek words: cosmos which means the world, the physical universe and polis which means city. From this etymology, we can deduce that cosmopolitism is the belief that one's city is everywhere in the world. This is clearer in stoic philosophy where the universal citizenship is declared by the stoic philosophers. According to them, we are all citizens of the world, the universe is our fatherland. Cosmopolitism lays emphasis on the disregard of national or local peculiarities or prejudices.

The philosophy of stoicism originated in Greece, and was based on the order of the universe. Nature to the stoics, the universe, was a precisely ordered cosmos. Stoics taught that there is an order behind all the evident confusion of the universe. Man's purpose was to acquire order within the universe; harmonizing himself with the universal order. Within this notion of harmonizing lies wisdom and sin resides in resisting the natural order or nature. The stoics also tell of a rational plan in nature; our role is to live in accord with this plan. The natural order is filled with divinity and all things possess a divine nature. This natural order is god, and thus the universe is god; the Greek and roman pathos were simply beliefs forged by superstition. The stoics also had a great indifference towards life, in the regard that the natural plan cannot be changed. This attitude made stoic's recluse from fame, and opposed to seeking it.

One fundamental belief stoics held is the universal community of mankind. They held that a political community is nothing more than its laws' borders, since the natural

25 laws are universally imposed; a universal political community existed in which all men share membership. This interpretation is generally regarded as the early stoic stage, which had yet to experience little roman influence. Upon roman adoption, stoicism went through a Romanizing period; an altering of the philosophy to better integrate into roman mainstream.

It is important to note that Cicero loses sight of the international community which Zeno, Cleanthes and Chrysippus taught. Cicero tries to link the universal community of mankind within the borders of roman political thought. This composite state expressed in Scipio by Cicero, is an ideal Rome of the past. The Rex was the royal element; the senate was the aristocratic influence; the plebs and patricians became the deciding people. By giving this blueprint of the ideal society, Cicero attempted to answer the stoic doctrine of the universal community of mankind. Cicero addressed the pragmatic problems faced by the universal community, by giving it armies, judges and powers; literally giving the community of mankind the powers it lacked through Rome. But what makes this attempt unattainable is the notion of Rome; Rome was a dividing agent. Rome was the polity that divides people; early stoics understood that tradition and politics divide people. Brotherhood of man is not the assimilation of people into Roman mainstream, but in reality the assimilation of Rome into the universal community. Cicero does not understand the spirit in which the universal community of mankind was thought.

It is, indeed, my judgment, opinion, and conviction that of all forms of government there is none which for organizing, distribution of power, and respect for authority is to be compared with that constitution which our fathers received from their ancestors and have bequeathed to us (...) The roman commonwealth will be the model; and to it shall apply, if I can, all that I must say about the perfect state.^I

Clearly, Cicero identifies the perfect State with Rome; he suggested that Rome was the closest thing to such an aspiration. The perfect State was the expression and

embodiment of the universal community of mankind, to link Rome with the ideal State; was to link Rome with the universal community. The early stoics held that a specific community was nothing more than its laws borders. Thus, arises the notion of a universal community, since we are all under the natural law imposed by the universe. The fundamental problem lies in that Rome could not realistically impose the natural law. Rome could simply impose laws of convention, which it could pass as natural law. This brought about a belief in dual citizenship; one roman, the other universal. But Cicero believed that Rome was the closest manifestation of the common community of man. A very clear bias was present, Cicero forced Roman sentiment on stoic thought; thereby changing it into something less grandiose than the stoics meant by universal citizenship.

With the assertion that the universe is our fatherland and that we are citizens of the world, we can deduce that the movement of all -Panmobilism- people in the universe should aim at the attainment of happiness. Men should be free to move in the universe, their fatherland and they should feel at home wherever they find themselves because external representations such as war, hunger, and poverty and so on, must not affect their inner self. They should preserve their ataraxia at all time, at any place and in all circumstances.

The concept of Cosmopolitism was considered in a special way by Immanuel Kant's writings on the philosophy of history, and particularly his political Project for a Perpetual Peace, in which he attempts to come to grips with the consequences of the breakdown of the pre-modern conception of the nation in order to outline the modern principles governing the three levels of right: of the Rechtsstaat, a state based on the rule of law; of the Völkerrecht, the people's right; and of the so-called Weltburgerrecht, the "cosmopolitical right". The decisive and perhaps disturbing idea that has to be demonstrated is that, in Kant's modern political thought; there is no contradiction between nationalism and cosmopolitism. Any interpretation of his thought that neglects this point would lead to a misunderstanding of Kant's philosophical revolution.

In Kant's work, we find cosmopolitism in two domains. Kant is first of all a moral cosmopolitan. Moral cosmopolitanism is the view that all human beings are members of a single moral community, language, religion, customs, and so on. Given that Kant defends the view that all human beings - broader still, all rational beings - belong to a single moral community, and that all humans are to be regarded as citizens of a supersensible moral world, Kant is clearly a moral cosmopolitan. In the context of a moral theory, this talk of world citizenship should be read analogically. It refers to membership in a moral community, rather than to political citizenship in a transnational state. The analogy between "citizens" in the moral world and political citizens is that in both cases, the individuals so designated are free and equal co-legislators in their respective communities. Kant also defends a political version of cosmopolitanism. Two aspects of his political philosophy are relevant here: his theory of the league of States and the doctrine of cosmopolitan law. In his essay, Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of view (I784), he argues for a "cosmopolitan situation", which would arise if states formed a federation "similar to a civil commonwealth"^I and submitted themselves to common laws and a common authority to enforce these laws. He calls such a league a great political body in which every member State receives its security and rights from a "united power and from decisions in accordance with the laws of a united will"².

Teilhard de Chardin takes roots on the Heraclitean tradition in order to develop a morality for humanity that will take into account the points of divergences, the specificities and local peculiarities. Although everything is in movement towards the Omega point, this movement does not aim at destroying the differences among peoples but it aims at building a form of conviviality, the civilization of the universal which is the panhuman convergence. Panmobilism in Teilhardian humanism springs from his metaphysics which is metaphysics of totality which will be applied to real men and women.

^I Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of view (I784), London, VIII, 25. ² Ibid., 24, 28.

Teilhard de Chardin's metaphysics is essentially metaphysics of convergence and totality. According to him, at first sight, beings and their destinies might seem to us to be scattered chaotically over the face of the earth; but the more one reflects, with the help of all that science, philosophy and religion can teach us, each in its own field, the more one comes to realize that the world should be likened not to a bundle of elements artificially held together, but rather to some organic system animated by a broad movement of development which is proper to itself. In effect,

[...] the distribution of living forms is a phenomenon of movement and dispersion. The lines are more numerous, they intersect less often and further from us than we thought -- all the same, they exist and, towards the base, they converge.^'

As centuries go by, it seems that a comprehensive plan is indeed being slowly carried out around us:

K 1l y a une affaire en train dans l'univers, un résultat en jeu, que nous ne saurions mieux comparer qu'a une gestation et a une naissance...Laborieusement, a travers et a la faveur de l'activité humaine, se rassemble, se degage et s'épure la Terre nouvelle. Non, nous ne sommes pas comparables aux elements d'un bouquet, mais aux feuilles et aux fleurs d'un grand arbre, sur lequel tout apparaat en son temps et a sa place, a la mesure et a la demande du Tout. »²

For Teilhard de Chardin therefore, there is a dynamic structural character of things and a temporal dimension of totality.

² Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hymne de l'univers, Paris, I96I, p. I5I. There is a situation that is taking place in the universe, a phenomenon that can be likened to pregnancy and to the giving-birth process. Arduously, through human activity, the new Earth is gathering itself. We are not to be likened to the items of a flower pot, which are gathered haphazardly; but to the leaves and flowers of a great tree, on which everything appears at the right time and at the right place, according to the measure and request of all the others.

2.1. The Teilhardian Methodology

Thomas Aquinas aspired to know the order of the whole world. It was the quest for that sort of knowledge--universal knowledge--that had originally led to the establishment of new European schools, schools whose very name belied the nature of their pursuit: the universities. This vision of Aquinas's and the original universities' spirit was largely lost in the institutions of the twentieth century. Isolation, specialization, and a general lack of interdisciplinary dialogue became the order of the day.

Teilhard de Chardin, though he was a twentieth century man, rejected this piecemeal approach to truth wholeheartedly. This was, for him, as much a moral decision as an intellectual one. From his earliest days, he was confronted with an inescapable desire for unity, wholeness, and coherence. The world, Teilhard de Chardin intuited, simply had to hold together. This meant that the hard facts of science-- successive layers of sediment, biological novelties, and fossil fragments--must somehow converge with theology, philosophy and thought. It was this passion for convergence that gave shape to Teilhard de Chardin's methodology. We will explore four principle components of that methodology. First, we will look at Teilhard de Chardin's unique phenomenology. Second, we will take further note of his passion for convergence and his conviction regarding the unity of truth. Then, we will look at Teilhard de Chardin's special emphasis on the "within" of things before finally concluding with a note on the ways Teilhard de Chardin moved even beyond his phenomenology to embrace a yet wider spectrum of truth.

2.1.1. A Phenomenology of the Universe

Teilhard de Chardin referred to the system employed in The Phenomenon of Man as a 'hyperphysics' or elsewhere, a 'phenomenology' of the universe. He was avowed in his insistence that this was not metaphysics or theology but science. His universal

30 phenomenology was not to deal with questions of being or with revelation; its concern was with phenomena. As he puts it in the preface to The Phenomenon of Man:

If this book is to be properly understood, it must be read not as a work on metaphysics, still less as a sort of theological essay, but purely and simply as a scientific treatise. The title itself indicates that. This book deals with man solely as a phenomenon; but it also deals with the whole phenomenon of man.^'

It is this attention to the 'whole phenomenon' that makes Teilhard de Chardin's phenomenology unique for while he vigorously contends that it is not philosophy or theology, the wholeness of his method ensures that he borders these subjects.

Teilhard de Chardin's choice of the word phenomenology lends itself to misinterpretation. Under the influence of Edmund Husserl and subsequent phenomenolo gists, that word today has come to have a quite specific meaning. For the latter Husserl, phenomenology is "the study of the essence of consciousness."^' This sort of phenomenological approach to the understanding of consciousness involves the study of the objects of mental acts precisely as they are, and with no regard to existence or the outside world at all. Consciousness alone is the object of inquiry.³ Teilhard de Chardin's phenomenology is of a different ilk altogether. Whereas Husserl is concerned only with consciousness and allows this as his sole datum, Teilhard de Chardin's data is the whole cosmos taken in its physicality and interiority. However, he does share with Husserl and the phenomenolo gists the conviction that phenomena must be studied as they are given. Norbertus Maximiliaan Wildiers says further:

If there is any link between Teilhard and the contemporary phenomenologists, it is to be looked for in the fact that for Teilhard too every effort to grasp the significance of the phenomena stands in a relation to man, seen not only in terms of his structure and his connection with other structures, but above all in his interiority.... The two forms

^I Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, Preface, New York, I959, p. '9.

^'Reinhardt Grossman, "Phenomenology." The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford, I995, p. 660. ³ Ibid., pp. 658-660.

of phenomenology differ where their object is concerned; but in the attitudes which they assume toward that object it is possible to discover a certain affinity.^'

2.1.2. Convergence and Complexification

Julian HUXLEY, one of the renowned commentators of our author, tells us that Teilhard de Chardin

[...] usually uses convergence to denote the tendency of mankind, during its evolution, to superpose centripetal on centrifugal trends, so as to prevent centrifugal differentiation from leading to fragmentation, and eventually to incorporate the results of differentiation in an organized and unified pattern.²

According to Teilhard de Chardin, human convergence was first manifested on the genetic or biological level: after Homo sapiens began to differentiate into distinct races or subspecies, migration and intermarriage prevented the pioneers from going further, and led to increasing interbreeding between all human variants. As a result, man is the only successful type which remained as a single interbreeding group or species, and has not radiated out into a number of biologically separated assemblages like birds with about 8,500 species, or the insects with over half a million.³ Cultural differentiation came in later and produced a number of psychosocial units with different cultures. Later on, the process known to anthropologists as cultural diffusion, facilitated by migration and improved communications led to an accelerating counter-process of cultural convergence, and so towards the union of the whole human species into a single interthinking group based on a single self-developing framework of thought, the noosystem.

^I Norbertus Maximiliaan Wildiers, An Introduction to Teilhard de Chardin. New York, I968, pp. 5I-52

² Julian Huxley in the introduction of The Phenomenon of Man, New York, I959, p. I2.

Again, Teilhard de Chardin showed himself aware of the danger that this noosystem might destroy the valuable results of cultural diversification, and lead to drab uniformity and not to a rich and potent pattern of variety in unity. However, as Julian Huxley tells us, he did not discuss the evolutionary value of cultural variety in detail, but contented himself by maintaining that East and West are culturally complementary and that both are needed for the further synthesis and unification of world thou ght. ^I All cultures, all civilizations, all peoples are called to come upon together through convergence in order to build up the civilization of the universal.

Complexification in Teilhardian metaphysics seems to be the valuable but rather difficult concept to be understood. This concept includes the genesis of increasingly elaborate organisation during Cosmo genesis, as manifested in the passage from subatomic units to atoms, from atoms to inorganic and later to organic molecules, thence to the first subcellular living units or self-replicating assemblages of molecules, and then to cells, to multicellular individuals, to cephalized metazoan with brains, to primitive man, and now to civilized societies.²

Still, Huxley affirms that for Teilhard de Chardin, it involves something more as

He speaks of complexification as an all-pervading tendency, involving the universe in all its parts in an enroulernent organique sur soi&rnerne, or by an alternative metaphor, as a reploiernent sur soi&rnerne. He thus envisages the world-stuff as being 'rolled up' or 'folded in' upon itself, both locally and in its entirety, and adds that the process is accompanied by an increase of energetic 'tension' in the resultant 'corpuscular' organizations, or individualized constructions of increased organizational complexity.³

^I Julian Huxley in the introduction of The Phenomenon of Man, New York, I959, p. I5.

Teilhard de Chardin also maintains that complexification by convergent integration leads to the intensification of mental subjective activity - in other words to the evolution towards progressively more conscious mind. Thus he asserts that full consciousness as seen in man is to be defined as the specific effect of organised complexity. As such, we must envisage the intensification of the mind, the raising of mental potential, as being the necessary consequence of complexification, operating by the convergent integration of increasingly complex units of organization.^I

For Teilhard de Chardin, the process of convergence in totality is one which occurs naturally, according to the pattern of the evolutionary process itself. Nevertheless, reflective man is capable of choosing whether to cooperate in the process or to oppose to it. He is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will be neither foolish enough nor wicked enough to defeat this totalisation.

Teilhard de Chardin is convinced that by taking note of the whole phenomenon, as it is and as it is given, something like the medieval synthesis may once again be achieved. The deeper each discipline delves and the more truth they respectively uncover, the closer they come to one another. He articulates his conviction:

Like the meridians as they approach the poles, science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole. I say `converge' advisedly, but without merging, and without ceasing, to the very end, to assail the real from different angles and on different planes. Take any book written by one of the great modern scientists, such as Poincaré, Einstein or Jeans, and you will see that it is impossible to attempt a general scientific interpretation of the universe without giving the impression of trying to explain it through and through. But look a little more closely and you will see that this `hyperphysics' is still not a metaphysic.²

While Teilhard de Chardin believes in the differentiation of the spheres of inquiry, scientific, theological or philosophical, he laments about their compartmentalization or disassociation. It is this that has led humanity to be somehow excluded from scientific study. Humanity is examined but not as a whole, not, that is, as the thinking part of the rest of the world. Even our everyday language displays this divorce between the hard sciences, on the one hand, and the humanities on the other. This disassociation is largely responsible for the failure of science, theology and philosophy to converge as they ought. By neglecting crucial data, namely, Teilhard de Chardin thinks, the phenomenon of human interiority in the natural world, science has ensured that these disciplines diverge. Teilhard de Chardin seeks to rectify this situation. He comments:

They treat man as a small separate cosmos, isolated from the rest of the universe. Any number of sciences concern themselves with man, but man, in that which makes him essentially human, still lies outside science. Nevertheless, we have only to think for a moment of the tremendous event represented by the explosion of thought on the surface of the earth to be quite certain that this great episode is something more than a part of the general system of nature: we have to accord to it a position of prime importance, from the point of view both of using and understanding the motive forces of nature.^I

In contrast to this, Teilhard de Chardin wants "to try to develop a homogenous and coherent perspective of our general extended experience of man."² Only such a full treatment of the human phenomenon will provide a sufficiently broad account of reality.

2.1.3. The Within of Things

The tremendous explosion of thought on the surface of the earth presents itself as the most peculiar and intriguing aspect of the human phenomenon, the human phenomenon being, for Teilhard de Chardin, the most intriguing aspect of the cosmic

phenomenon. Teilhard de Chardin's scientific approach to reality then, includes the crucial concept of interiority or, as he says, the within of things. If we are to know something we must know it within as well as without.

We shall cover this concept more fully below, but it suffices to say here that a study of this within of things involves a question of purpose. An example will illustrate the importance of this. Let us imagine some extra-terrestrial scientist studying one of our automobiles. He may examine it bumper to bumper, delineating such things as its weight, size, chemical components and even the wavelengths of its color. He will not however, have discovered that it is a car until he comes upon the fact that it is meant to be driven, that is to say, that this conglomeration of metals and plastics is a vehicle. So is it with the phenomena of the cosmos and, especially, with the phenomenon of man: they will only be understood once their purpose is discovered. Teilhard de Chardin recognizes this and includes in his scientific, cosmic phenomenology the question of a thing's end; to use an Aristotelian term, Teilhard de Chardin addresses the issue of a thing's entelechy.¹

Beyond the issue of entelechy, this withinness can also be described broadly as consciousness. Teilhard de Chardin believes that there is a level of consciousness, albeit minute, present at even the molecular level. His scientific phenomenology seeks to take account of this and does not limit itself simply to what is measurable externally.

2.1.4. Beyond Phenomenology

Despite his scientific methodology, Teilhard de Chardin always shines through his words, cadences, and images. In this light, David TRACY asserts:

To read Teilhard de Chardin is less like reading a philosopher or theologian or scientist, though he was all three, than it is like reading a great visionary, at once a poet and a mystic.^'

The problem with visionaries, poets and mystics is that so often their feet are far from terra firma. Teilhard de Chardin avoids this error by articulating and adhering to a rigorous methodology throughout The Phenomenon of Man.

In other writings Teilhard de Chardin employed other methods, crossing fully into theology, poetry, mysticism and even philosophy. The Phenomenon of Man is admirably consistent; however, the only real exception is his epilogue, "The Christian Phenomenon." Henri de LUBAC has noted that the description of this chapter as an epilogue was utterly intentional for here and here alone he significantly strays from his phenomenological inquiry. Speculating on the nature of Christ within his evolutionary scheme, Teilhard de Chardin appeals unabashedly to revelation displaying a side suppressed throughout the rest of The Phenomenon of Man.

In his methodology, Teilhard de Chardin aimed at literally taking everything into scientific account. It is an audacious project which has annoyed some even while enrapturing others. Bernard Towers, one of the latter, and goes so far as to compare Teilhard de Chardin's work, in scope and in quality, to the great Thomas Aquinas himself. At the end though, Teilhard de Chardin's vision was higher than his achievement and he knew it. In proposing such a sweeping project, the point was not so much to get it right as to simply try it.

Theologians, philosophers and scientists have all found legitimate grounds upon which to contend with Teilhard de Chardin. His great phenomenology proves unsuccessful at some points. Teilhard de Chardin knew his vision was incomplete and as a scientist, he expected and even hoped that it would be amended:

^I David Tracy, Christian Spirituality: Post-Reformation and Modern, New York, Crossroad, I996, p.I53.

It is up to others to try to do better. My one hope is that I have made the reader feel both the reality, difficulty, and urgency of the problem and, at the same time, the scale and the form which the solution cannot escape.^'

For this reason, Doran McCarty says that, "a very important part of Teilhard's methodology is his dynamic form."² Like everything in Teilhard de Chardin's world, his vision is subject to evolutionary forces: his vision itself is moving somewhere, onward and upward.

2.2. From Alpha to Omega: The Evolution of Consciousness

Teilhard de Chardin says: "Seeing...We might say that the whole of life lies in that verb--if not ultimately, at least essentially."³ He continues:

Fuller being is closer union: such is the kernel and conclusion of this book. But let us emphasize the point: union increases only through an increase in consciousness, that is to say vision. And that, doubtless, is why the history of the living world can be summarized as the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is always something more to be seen.⁴

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was, as we have said, a visionary. His writing everywhere bursts with excitement as he gazes upon and describes this cosmos where there is always something more to be seen. His chief description is an account of the historical unfolding of these ever more perfect eyes, that is to say, an account of the evolution of consciousness.

Teilhard de Chardin sees this evolution proceeding through a series of four stages that correspond with the four 'books' contained in The Phenomenon of Man. We can describe these stages as: matter, life, humanity, and Christ; or perhaps, the cosmic,

38 the biotic, the noetic, and the Christic;^I or again, to use terms Teilhard de Chardin was fond of, the Geosphere, the Biosphere, the Noosphere, and the Christosphere.² Fundamental to each stage is its evolutionary nature. These stages are dynamic not static; they are in motion and can therefore be described as Cosmo genesis, Biogenesis, Noo genesis, and Christo genesis. 'Whatever we call them, describing the advance of evolution through these successive stages or epochs is the heart of The Phenomenon of Man.

2.2.1. The Cosmic: The time before life

Teilhard de Chardin begins where any cosmology must, in the time before the emergence of life. He starts simply with matter--as he calls it, the "stuff of the universe."³ He describes these basic atomic and molecular structures as they surprisingly and wondrously find each other, joining together in increasing molecular complexity. It is a marvel to behold and Teilhard de Chardin captures the electric intensity of the event quite well. But then he sounds a note of disillusionment for though we have marveled at the forces of complexification, the improbable arrangements of atoms that capture our attention, we must still come face to face with the forces of entropy and decay. Teilhard de Chardin describes the situation as follows:

Laboriously, step by step, the atomic and molecular structures become higher and more complex, but the upward force is lost on the way.... Little by little, the improbable combinations that they represent become broken down again into more simple components, which fall back and are disaggregated in the shapelessness of probable distributions. A rocket rising in the wake of time's arrow, that only bursts to be extinguished;

^I David Gareth Jones proposes similar terms- cosmic, human, Christic- but inexplicably fails to recognize the biotic. Cf. Jones, Teilhard de Chardin: An Analysis and an Assessment, London, I969, p. 25.

² These are the terms McCarty uses when describing Teilhard's stages though, oddly, he fails to include the final stage of the Christosphere. Cf. McCarty, Teilhard de Chardin, p. 5I. That both Jones and McCarty would use a threefold rather than fourfold division of Teilhard's stages is especially strange since, as we noted, Teilhard clearly delineates them in the four sections (`books') of The Phenomenon of Man.

an eddy rising on the bosom of a descending current--such then must be our picture of the world. So says science...^I

Reflecting on such phenomena as the second law of thermal dynamics Teilhard de Chardin anticipates the reader's reaction: Can there be any point to it? Can we explore further? Do these earliest explorations teach us that evolution cannot but unravel, cannot but degenerate? Teilhard de Chardin continues, " So says science: and I believe in science: but up to now has science ever troubled to look at the world other than from without?"²

To speak of a within at these earliest stages of the cosmos may seem nonsensical to most readers. How, we ask incredulously, can he deem to speak of the within of an atom? For Teilhard de Chardin however, the question was reversed: how can we not speak of it? He understood the universe to be akin to a single organism and he concluded therefore, that if humanity has a within, then we can reason by extension that,

...there is necessarily a double aspect to the structure [of the stuff of the universe], that is to say in every region of space and time... co-extensive with their Without, there is a Within to things.³

For Teilhard de Chardin, consciousness, an equivalent term for the 'within' of things,⁴ "is taken in its widest sense to indicate every kind of psychism, from the most rudimentary forms of perception imaginable to the human phenomenon of reflective thought."⁵ He states categorically that it does not emerge through some spontaneous generation of mind; it is present, at least minutely, in even the most elementary forms.⁶ This is why we can speak of The Phenomenon of Man as being about the evolution of consciousness even though life itself doesn't appear until book two and thought in book three. At every point and in

⁶ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin says: "Matter is the matrix of Spirit" in The Heart of Matter, New York, I979, p. 35.

40 everything throughout the history of the cosmos, consciousness has been present. Teilhard de Chardin described this poetically in "The Mass on the World^;I:

In the beginning was Power, intelligent, loving, energizing. In the beginning was the WORD, supremely capable of mastering and molding whatever might come into being in the world of matter. In the beginning, there were not coldness and darkness, there was the FIRE.^'

This perception of nascent consciousness even in the beginning lead Teilhard de Chardin to articulate the Law of Complexity-Consciousness or, as it has become known, Teilhard's Law. The Law of Complexity-Consciousness describes Teilhard's two central perceptions regarding evolution:

Thus, Teilhard de Chardin approximates the level of consciousness present within any given subject through an examination of its external complexity: a spider is more conscious than an amoeba; an iguanodon than a spider; a dog than an iguanodon; an ape than a dog; a human than an ape. With each subject there is an observable increase in material complexity, just as there is an increase in consciousness. Using this law we could postulate, for example, that an electron has more consciousness than a quantum. But they all possess some form of consciousness, some form of potential life.

^I Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn of the Universe, New York, I965, p. 2I. ² Id.

To explain further how one gets from the atom to Adam, Teilhard de Chardin expands on the notion of energy.^I All energy, he says, is psychic in nature but it is divided into two distinct components.² On the one hand, there is what he calls tangential energy of which we are all more or less familiar. Tangential energy is the energy of thermodynamics, the force of entropy and heat death, and the energy which governs external relationships. It tends to link one element to another at the same level of complexity or organization and, with just a little imagination; one can see how this leads to entropy, a dissolution to the lowest level of complexity. But there is a second form of energy, radial energy, with which we are less familiar. Radial energy draws elements "towards ever greater complexity and centricity--in other words forwards."^' Radial energy, something we do not yet know how to measure, is the force of union which is also called axial or centric energy, drawing elements onward and upward, and manifesting itself ultimately in love.

These two forms are not two things but two forms of a single, psychic energy. They exist complementarily but in polarity. Like the foci of an ellipse, with the increase of radial energy, the pull of tangential energy lessens and vice-versa. The play of these two ever present forms of energy, especially the triumph of the radial, goes some way in explaining the evolution of matter, from the hydrogen simplicity of the spiral nebula to the complexity of chemicals on the crust of planets, long before Darwin's survival of the fittest could ever make one bit of difference.

^I At the time The Phenomenon of Man was written Teilhard de Chardin was still developing his understanding of energy and, though he never departed from the basics outlined here, he did develop them significantly. Near the end of his life he was enraptured with the idea of human energy and considered this to be the most fruitful and needed area of study in the whole of science. This is the thought lying being one of his most oft quoted lines, The day will come when, after harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.

2.2.2 The Biotic: The beginning of life

Teilhard de Chardin turns his attention now to the planet earth, with just the right sun, the right distance from its sun, the right axial tilt, the right moon, the planet earth where life takes its first groping steps. Radial energy propels evolution forward through precisely this mechanism of groping. Teilhard's radial energy, whether on a molecular or biological stage, does not advance along a straight line in the sort of crude ortho genesis utterly rejected by modern science.^I Rather, he presents this energy as moving forward through a series of attempts, some successful, some not. As Bernard TOWERS comments:

It would be astonishing if this `groping' did not lead, more often than not, into byways and blind alleys, where the radial-energy-potential slowly runs down. But if we think of the process, as Teilhard always did, in terms of the whole rather than of the individual element or group, then even the blind alleys become meaningful. For complexity-consciousness to be possible, and to go on increasing, there must be variety in the environment for consciousness to operate on.² .

How many blind alleys there were? We do not know but Teilhard de Chardin describes the surface of the early earth covered with

(...) a thickness of some miles, in water, in air, in muddy deposits, ultra-microscopic grains of protein thickly strewn over the surface of the earth. Our imaginations boggle at the mere thought of counting the flakes of this snow.³

The tangential flow of energy continues as always, uniting and dissipating, but the radial energy presses undauntedly onward, groping this way and that, moving upward in intensity. There is a sound, as it were, of crackling over surface of the deep. "Something is going to burst out upon the early earth, and this thing is Life."⁴

The transition from pre-life to life is, so to speak, organic; the former grows out of the latter. How then, given Teilhard's hypothesis of consciousness and pre-life present even in the smallest of granules, can we differentiate one from the other? It must be understood that although Teilhard de Chardin clearly delineates a series of stages, each containing even more stages, he still views the entire drama, from the cosmic to the Christic, as an organic whole. He recognizes differentiation in evolutionary development without that leading to divorce. There is, as Norbertus Maximilaan Wildiers notes, "a discontinuity in the continuity."^I Such differentiation is observed in cosmic, organic and noetic thresholds or critical points. A critical point occurs when an element's energy reaches a certain level after which it becomes a qualitatively different element. Imagine the transition from water to gas which occurs at the critical point of I00 degrees Celsius or, for that matter, of water to ice at 0 degrees. As Teilhard de Chardin comments,

In every domain, when anything exceeds a certain measurement, it suddenly changes its aspect, condition or nature... This is the only way in which science can speak of a `first instant'. But it is none-the-less a true way.²

The first instant of life, presaged by the complexification of molecules and even the first viruses, occurs with the cell. Teilhard de Chardin sees this too as an event in the evolution of consciousness, the "cellular awakening" ³ as it were. Shortly after the emergence of the first cell, or cells since they may have appeared almost simultaneously in large numbers, the biosphere was established as life flooded over the whole earth.⁴ Teilhard de Chardin in this light says that "Life no sooner started, than it swarmed.^°

Life ascends, radial energy propelling it to grope upwards, though now with the help of life's own competitive struggle, that natural selection to which Darwinism is so committed. Teilhard de Chardin grants this some legitimacy, but stops short of

^I Norbertus Maximilaan Wildiers, An Introduction to Teilhard de Chardin, New York, I968, p. 7I.

44 Darwinism. He contends that 'natural selection' is one of those vehicles seized upon by radial energy in its groping ortho genesis. He points out that the advance of species, that is to say, their evolution as opposed to just change, is not mere chance:

It would be a mistake to see it as mere chance. Groping is directed chance. It means pervading everything so as to try everything, and trying everything so as to find everything.^I

What emerges from this vision of groping-ortho genetic-evolution is a picture Teilhard de Chardin calls the tree of life. Radial energy ramifies through the biosphere creating and exploring ever new phyla. From our position we tend to look at these variegated species as all possessing one and the same instinct. That is, we frequently speak as if each animal consciousness was identical. Teilhard de Chardin maintains that this is a mistake. "Life, he says, is the rise of consciousness,"² or as Joseph Kopp puts it, "biogenesis (ramification of life) is in the first place psychogenesis (ramification of spirit)."³ At every step along the way there is a change of some sort in the psychism of the animal species. Instinct is not a single thing; rather there are many instincts, each appropriate to that species:

The 'psychical' make-up of an insect is not and cannot be that of a vertebrate; nor can the instinct of a squirrel be that of a cat or an elephant: this in virtue of the position of each on the tree of life.⁴

Teilhard de Chardin continues, describing these variations as an evolution of consciousness, an ascending system:

They form as a whole a kind of fan-like structure in which the higher terms on each nervure are recognized each time by a greater range of choice and depending on a better defined centre of co-ordination and consciousness... The mind (or

psyche) of a dog, despite all that may be said to the contrary, is positively superior to that of a mole or a fish.^'

Still, despite these differences, internal and external, Teilhard de Chardin is an advocate to the end for the unity of the biosphere. Life appeared once and has since ramified itself throughout the tree of life. Teilhard de Chardin speaks of the earth as a single growing organism.

The earth is after all something more than a sort of huge breathing body. Admittedly it rises and falls, but more important is the fact that it must have begun at a certain moment; that it is passing through a consecutive series of moving equilibria; and that in all probability it is tending towards some final state. It has a birth, a development, and presumably a death ahead^'.

The highest shoot of this organism at the top of the tree of life is the mammalian branch³. Here we see complexity and consciousness reaching levels achieved nowhere else. And it is here among the mammals that one must look for the future of evolution. Teilhard de Chardin concludes:

We already knew that everywhere the active phyletic lines grow warm with consciousness towards the summit. But in one well-marked region at the heart of the mammals, where the most powerful brains ever made by nature are to be found, they become red hot. And right at the heart of that glow burns a point of incandescence. We must not lose sight of that line crimsoned by the dawn. After thousands of years rising below the horizon, a flame bursts forth at a strictly localized point. Thought is born.4

2.2.3. The Noetic: the beginning of thought

Thought is born and this nativity is no less significant than the very advent of life. Thought which Teilhard de Chardin likens to reflection or consciousness coiled back in upon itself finds a home in the human being. Here at last, says Teilhard de Chardin, is the summit of evolution as we know it.^I

For Teilhard de Chardin, what sets thought apart from all lesser types of consciousness, and what so fascinates him, is the phenomenon of reflection. Reflection is a sort of quantum leap in consciousness. Teilhard de Chardin defines it as

L..] the power acquired by a consciousness to turn in upon itself, to take possession of itself as of an object endowed with its own particular consistence and value: no longer merely to know but to know oneself; no longer merely to know but to know that one knows.²

Thought, we might say, is consciousness squared and its emergence affects everything. As Teilhard de Chardin writes:

Man is psychically distinguished from all other animals by the entirely new fact that he not only knows, but knows that he knows. In him, for the first time on earth, consciousness has coiled back upon itself to become thought. To an observer unaware of what it signifies, the event might at first seem to have little importance; but in fact it represents the complete resurgence of terrestrial life upon itself. In reflecting psychically upon itself Life made a new start.³

Life's new start was momentous but not immediately noticeable. Indeed, like all other advances in evolution, this threshold disappears under the weight of the past.⁴

⁴ Teilhard de Chardin, as an apologist for evolution, often makes reference to what he calls the suppression of the peduncles. At every critical stage, the earliest transitionary forms are the most fragile and vanish under the weight of history. This is true biologically even as it is technologically; where, he asks, are the very first buggies? Who was the first Greek or Roman? Cf. The Phenomenon of Man, pp. I20-I22.

47 "Man came silently into the world," says Teilhard de Chardin.^I We must not make the mistake of treating this remarkable new human being as something other than a part of nature. The same play of tangential and radial energy that brought into existence the first crystals, the first plants, the first animals, here brought to birth the first occurrence of mind. In short, humanity is a natural phenomenon, the latest of life's successive waves.² Teilhard de Chardin describes a world very much like our own with,

[...]myriads of antelopes and zebras, a variety of proboscidians in herds, deer with every kind of antler, tigers, wolves, foxes and badgers, all similar to those we have today. In short, the landscape is not too dissimilar from that which we are today seeking to preserve in National Parks -- on the Zambesi, in the Congo, or in Arizona. Except for a few lingering archaic forms, so familiar is this scene that we have to make an effort to realize that nowhere is there so much as a wisp of smoke rising from camp or village.³

Then somewhere, perhaps along the great majestic steppes of Africa, something revolutionary occurred: a breakthrough. In a flash, in the midst of the anthropoids, consciousness took an infinite leap forward:

Outwardly, almost nothing in the organs had changed. But in depth, a great revolution had taken place: consciousness was now leaping and boiling in a space of super-sensory relationships and representations; and simultaneously consciousness was capable of perceiving itself in the concentrated simplicity of its faculties. And all this happened for the first time.⁴

This strange and wonderful event, a mutation from zero to everything, resulted in the first persons. Reflection is consciousness turned inward. Whereas before humanity, consciousness only radiated outwards perceiving the world to a greater or lesser degree through the senses, we can now for the first time in history speak of centers of consciousness. This enroulement, `inturning process', leads to the reality of

48 personalization. Teilhard de Chardin sums it up, "The cell has become `someone'. After the grain of matter, the grain of life; and now at last we see constituted the grain of thought.~^I

Surveying the globe today, the significance of this emergence is uncontestable. Since its recent egression, humanity has ascended to a position of unrivaled privilege. We are everywhere now engaged in the process of becoming yet more human, even of making the earth itself more human. Teilhard de Chardin calls this process hominisation. Hominisation has two aspects.

[It] can be accepted in the first place as the individual and instantaneous leap from instinct to thought, but it is also, in a wider sense, the progressive phyletic spiritualization in human civilization of all the forces contained in the animal world.²

To clarify: in humanity evolution finally becomes conscious of itself. We right now are in evolution looking at itself, reflecting upon itself.³ Humanity stands like a priest representative of all the forces in the animal world. In the reflective consciousness of a man or a woman, nature itself after laboring so long, participates in the phenomenon of thought. Teilhard de Chardin therefore understands the entire span of organic and cosmic evolution in light of this Hominisation:

[...] if we are going towards a human era of science, it will be eminently an era of human science. Man, the knowing subject, will perceive at last that man, `the object of knowledge', is the key to the whole science of nature.⁴

Humanity is the key to understanding evolution revealing it to be precisely an evolution of consciousness. De facto the history of evolution is the history of the evolution of persons. For Teilhard de Chardin, that evolution should result in the evolution of persons is of profound significance.

Teilhard de Chardin puts this in historical perspective. Science, in the person of COPERNICUS, removed humanity from its arrogant position of privilege within the universe and we have ever since grown increasingly wary of anthropomorphism, anthropocentrisms, and so on. But now that same science, this time in an evolutionary form, restores humanity to a place of even greater dignity as the apex of cosmic evolution. Without returning to vulgar anthropomorphisms, now, we must nevertheless see the cosmos in light of the human person.

Man is not the centre of the universe as once we thought in our simplicity, but something much more wonderful--the arrow pointing the way to the final unification of the world in terms of life. Man alone constitutes the last-born, the freshest, the most complicated, the most subtle of all the successive layers of life.^'

Here we find ourselves cast upon Teilhard's concept of the Noosphere. Some years before Teilhard de Chardin, in I875, the Austrian geologist Eduard SUESS had coined the term biosphere to describe the skin of living material stretched out upon the earth. Suess derived his neologism from two existing geological terms: the lithosphere which described the solid rocky crust of the earth and just below it the yet more dense liquid of barysphere. With Eduard Suess, we had the barysphere, the lithosphere and the biosphere. Teilhard de Chardin however, adds the Noosphere as a description of that skin of mind that, since the advent of Hominisation, has stretched itself out over the biosphere. Teilhard de Chardin describes this event:

A glow ripples outward from the first spark of conscious reflection. The point of ignition grows larger. The fire spreads in ever widening circles till finally the whole planet is covered with incandescence... It is really a new layer, the 'thinking layer', which, since its germination at the end of the Tertiary period, has spread over and above the world of plants and animals.³

The Noosphere is a sort of envelope of mind, a lattice of thought, relationships, and love that spans the globe, a matrix of personal interconnectivity. It is the support structure of Hominisation. As the Noosphere has developed, with, for example, the invention of oral traditions, libraries, or various tools and means of communication, it has become, among other things, a collective depository of human memory. Though we are wont to regard such noospheric structures as synthetic we must see them as a continuation of the same cosmic drama to which we have thus far been attending. When evolution, with the appearance of humanity, took its second critical turn, the first being the appearance of life, the mechanisms of evolution themselves went through a decisive change. Now that thought had at last burst forth the process of evolution moved, more or less, from soma to psyche.^I

The Noosphere is today the psychic front of evolution. Since the emergence of reflection, evolutionary advancement occurs less and less through heredity and increasingly through conscious means such as communication or education. In the Noosphere, we see Teilhard de Chardin's vision of evolution going far beyond the cosmic or biological spheres. Social evolution, psychic evolution, cultural evolution and moral evolution: these are all parts of the one process that birthed both the stars, and the swamps and all of the life therein. "The social phenomenon, says Teilhard de Chardin, is the culmination and not the attenuation of the biological phenomenon."²

Noo genesis occurs on any number of fronts. For example, Teilhard de Chardin equates it with technological progress of all kinds. He describes the proliferation of factories, the harnessing of the earth's powers, the spread of human civilization with awed enthusiasm. He looks reverently forward to humanity's mastery of eugenics or artificial creation of neo-life.³ Teilhard de Chardin's optimism in these matters may seem

^IPierre Teilhard de Chardin, Op. cit., p. 202 "[...] evolution has [...] overtly overflowed its anatomical modalities to spread, or perhaps even to transplant its main thrust into the zones of psychic spontaneity both individual and collective. Henceforward it is in that form almost exclusively that we shall be recognizing it and following its course."

51 naïve, and even reckless, but he did attempt to tie this dangerous concept of progress to a profound reverence for the earth and all of creation. There is a moral element to his fascination with progress that is revealed by his comment, "There is less difference than people think between research and adoration."^' His moral bearings become even more pronounced when he insists on the fact that this progression of science must always wrestle with the question of "how to give to each and every element its final value by grouping them in the unity of the organized whole."²

Which brings us to the most characteristic quality of the noosphere, namely, collectivity or universality? We recall that evolution has proceeded all along, in Teilhard de Chardin's view, through the pull of radial energy. In humanity and the consequent Noosphere, radial energy achieves a new level of ascendancy. He first notices this in the peculiar phenomenon of humanity. "Formerly, on the tree of life, says Teilhard, we had :in all phyla] a mere tangle of stems; now over the whole domain of Homo sapiens we have synthesis."³ Different races, cultures, and traditions, what Teilhard de Chardin likens to different species, shuffle and blend psychically and biologically. The roundness of the earth even plays its part, for some time now bringing us all ever closer to one another and forcing greater levels of cooperation and communication. Looking at our modern world, Teilhard de Chardin comments:

No one can deny that a network (a world network) of economic and psychic affiliations is being woven at ever increasing speed which envelops and constantly penetrates more deeply within each of us. With every day that passes it becomes a little more impossible for us to act or think otherwise than collectively.^'

In this rush to collectivity however, one must not forget the preeminence of the personal, the essence of Hominisation. The odd trend displayed by evolution is one towards an ever higher degree of personality along with a concomitant rise in

52 universality. This is the ideal of radial energy, the heights of complexity-consciousness. Such a uniting of personal centers with other personal centers occurs most fully in Love.

And so the evolution of the Noosphere presents itself to us as a movement towards ever greater unity, cooperation and love. Teilhard de Chardin illustrates it succinctly:

As the Noosphere approaches this collectivity, it has planetary and even cosmic repercussions. If Hominisation includes all the forces of the animal world, as Teilhard de Chardin maintains, then the phenomenon of planetization becomes supremely significant. It is, says Teilhard de Chardin, nothing short than the emergence of a single planetary spirit; in Teilhard's language, the spirit of the earth, the spirit of evolution.² Teilhard de Chardin looks ahead and comments,

Peace through conquest, work in joy. These are waiting for us beyond the line where empires are set up against other empires, in an interior totalisation of the world upon itself, in the unanimous construction of a spirit of the earth.³

As radial energy has gained in ascendancy, through the historical increase of complexity-consciousness, it has become increasingly liberated from the decay of the tangential. This has translated to an ever greater degree of environmental freedom each step along the way. With the deployment of the Noosphere this freedom reaches a high point. Until fairly recently, evolution continued going along gropingly but unabated. No longer, for an evolution aware of itself is also an evolution that can choose to simply quit. In this regard, Teilhard de Chardin says:

[...] evolution, by becoming conscious of itself in the depths of ourselves [...] becomes free to dispose of itself--it can give itself or refuse itself. Not only do we read in our slightest acts the secret of its proceedings; but for an elementary part we hold it in our hands, responsible for its past to its future.^'

Teilhard de Chardin turns to existential language when discussing this new phase of consciousness evolution. Having become reflective, evolution conscious of itself, humanity becomes the first creature capable of cosmic refusal. If in surveying the globe with its conditions of war, poverty, and injustice, humans conclude that our efforts are futile, then it remains only for us to give up. To do so would be to relinquish evolution itself, to bring the whole cosmic process screeching to a halt.

Teilhard de Chardin sees humanity as the apex of evolution but not the end. He anticipates a future spirit of the earth but concedes that it is not yet inevitable. There is precariousness to humanity's present condition that must be met with a reliable vision of the future. Hope must be kindled; instead of despair and angst, Teilhard de Chardin insists, even the prognostications of science must somehow generate a taste for life, for upon this love of life and kindling of hope hangs the whole cosmic project of evolution.

If progress is a myth, that is to say, if faced by the work involved we can say: 'What's the good of it all?' our efforts will flag. With that the whole of evolution will come to a halt--because we are evolution.²

2.2.4. The Christic: the fulfillment of all

In Book 4 of The Phenomenon of Man Teilhard de Chardin turns away from the past, fixes his gaze on the future. In this discussion of the future, as Robert SPEAIGHT

² Ibid., p. 23I. Teilhard de Chardin makes a note here stating: 'There is no such a thing as the 'energy of despair' in spite of what is sometimes said. What those words really mean is a paroxysm of hope against hope. All conscious energy is, like love (and because it is love), founded on hope'. We shall consider this optimistic vision of Teilhard de Chardin in the second part of our work.

tells us, Teilhard de Chardin's originality is most profound and his passion most pronounced. "The future, he says, is more beautiful than all the pasts."^'

In order to treat the future with the same dignity he has given the past, Teilhard de Chardin must continue to treat it scientifically. But how does one arrive scientifically at a view of the future? For Teilhard de Chardin, the answer is simple: applying the same logic an astronomer uses to predict, say, planetary alignment or a solar eclipse, Teilhard de Chardin looks at the principles and direction of evolution in the past and from them extrapolates evolution's destination in the future.

Before proceeding it is necessary to review the story thus far. From the very beginning a process of cosmic evolution was underway. Even inanimate matter was caught up into this stream propelled ever forward in increasing complexity-consciousness. Eventually the pull of radial energy, the energy of union and transcendence that can also be called love, resulted in the first faltering steps of life. Life spread like a fire over the geosphere and the biosphere was born. Evolution continued as the biotic force ramified, flowering ever new peduncles on the tree of life. Relatively recently, a new critical point was reached as one shoot on this tree began to reflect upon itself: the birth of thought, the advent of humanity.

Each stage in this grand story saw the progressive liberation of increasing amounts of consciousness, radial energy freeing itself more and more from the strictures of the tangential. At the last critical threshold, Hominisation, this radial liberation resulted in a sudden and unexpected change in the mechanism of evolution. With the advent of Homo sapiens the process of ramification was finally abandoned. Evolution switched from a primarily divergent direction to an overwhelmingly convergent one.² As a result, humanity became engaged in the grand project of Noo genesis, the heart of which was a move towards planetisation and reaching its high point in love. From this point, Teilhard extrapolates.

^I Robert Speaight, The Life of Teilhard de Chardin., New York, I967, p. II0. ² See appendix II.

As far as Teilhard de Chardin is concerned, humanity is a work in progress, at present no more than an embryo of what it shall one day become. Marvelous as they might be, the emergence of humanity and the concomitant noosphere do not mark the end of evolution. Their significance is not the termination of evolution but a change of venue: humanity has become the field upon which evolution is now at play. In this sense, Teilhard de Chardin agrees with NIETZSCHE that man is made to be surpassed. However, Teilhard de Chardin does not anticipate some Nietzschean ubermensch emerging in the future, but instead sees a vision of super-humanity. He says:

The outcome of the world, the gates of the future, the entry into the super-human--these are not thrown open to a few of the privileged nor to one chosen people to the exclusion of all others. They will open only to an advance of all together, in a direction in which all together can join and find completion in a spiritual renovation of the earth, a renovation whose physical degree of reality we must now consider and whose outline we must make clearer.¹

Teilhard de Chardin arrives at this vision of the all-together ascent of humankind through an extrapolation of his former logic. We recall his formula:

From these two postulates Teilhard de Chardin deduces a third: namely, that this increase in consciousness and movement towards union must result in a centre, a point of utmost consciousness. Teilhard de Chardin calls this point of ultimate consciousness, the terminus of evolution wherein humanity transcends itself, the Omega Point³.

There is a tendency to assume that any collective transcendence of humanity must be impersonal, but Teilhard de Chardin will have none of this. Persons after all, are de facto what evolution labored so long to create; that the personal should be lost then is inconceivable.^I Far from disappearing, the personal will actually increase as it rushes headlong towards the universal. Teilhard de Chardin calls this state of excited-personality the Hyper-Personal. He states flatly,

It is therefore a mistake to look for the extension of our being or of the Noosphere in the Impersonal. The Future-Universal could not be anything else but the Hyper-Personal - at the Omega Point.²

It is one thing to postulate a hyper-personal-collective-future but another thing entirely to make this concept intelligible. In an effort to do so Teilhard de Chardin introduces one of his most characteristic axioms: union differentiates a phrase as connected with Teilhard de Chardin as the cogito is with Descartes. True union differentiates, believes Teilhard de Chardin, and so Omega is not a great ocean swallowing and eradicating the grains of consciousness that flow into it, but is rather a distinct Center radiating at the core of a system of centers.³ The hyper-personal doesn't just transcend but includes and intensifies the personal. Omega is more personal than we, not less.

Teilhard de Chardin maintains that there is a difference between personality and individuality. The egoist tries to separate himself as much as possible from others in order to individualize, but in doing so drags the world backwards towards a retrograde plurality. In contrast, Teilhard de Chardin says that "the goal of ourselves, the acme of our originality, is not our individuality but our person.' We don't become persons through isolation but through communion, through relationships. Thus, "the true ego

^I "[...] a Universe in process of psychic concentration [such as ours] is identical with a Universe that is acquiring a personality." The Future of Man, p. 79. See also The Phenomenon of Man, pp. 258-264.

57 grows in inverse proportion to egoism."^' Teilhard de Chardin suggests that this seemingly paradoxical statement proves itself in everyday life. When we love with abandon, losing ourselves in the beloved, don't we at the same time become more truly ourselves? We find ourselves, so to speak, in the other. Union doesn't just differentiate, it centrifies, it personalizes; ultimate union with Omega personifies ultimately.

2.2.4.1. Omega: the unity of the multiple

The notion of creative union is central to Teilhard de Chardin's entire system of thought. In effect, here lies the basis of his consideration of^@Panmobilism'. Creative union is the theory that leads us to such a collectivisation of humankind, what he calls Hominisation as he says:

The coalescence of elements and the coalescence of stems, the spherical geometry of the earth and psychical curvature of the mind harmonising to counterbalance the individual and the collective forces of dispersion in the world and to impose unification - there at last we find the spring and secret of hominisation.²

Individual forces and even collective forces of dispersal are being harmonised through the gathering of the elements of the earth in order to bring forth unification which is finally the work of Hominisation.

From such a metaphysical framework, Teilhard de Chardin laid the foundation of the Civilization of the Universal, the Pan-human-mobilism, where the problem of the One and the Many was considered in terms of real men and women. As he says:

I find that the one great problem of the one and the manifold is rapidly beginning to emerge from the over-metaphysical context in which I used to state it and look for its solutions. I can now see more clearly that its urgency and its difficulties must be expressed in terms of real men and women.³

³ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in Cuénot, C., Teilhard de Chardin, London, I965, p. 377.

Pan- human-mobilism is a convergence that synthesizes the One and the Many. More than this, in Teilhardian metaphysics, however, love in unifying, ultra-personalizes. Thus Teilhard de Chardin's Cosmo-mysticism falls in line with the demands of established Christian mysticism and this was the core of his own spiritual life.

If evolution progresses, it must progress along the lines of this increased personalization, that is, it must culminate in Omega Point.^I Even as a cell is more than the sum of its molecules, or a plant more than the sum of its cells, so too is Omega more than the sum of its persons. Teilhard de Chardin catalogues four necessary and novel attributes of this Omega Point:²

I. Actuality: Omega is neither an ideal nor a potential, but is rather, 'present' and 'real'. Though it arises out of the Noosphere, it has its own ontological reality like consciousness which arose out of the biosphere but has its own reality.

² Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, New York, I959, pp. 267-272.

Teilhard de Chardin says: "Omega must be independent of the collapse of the forces with which evolution is woven."^'

4. Transcendence: Looked at from the historical process, Omega "only reveals half of itself,» says Teilhard de Chardin. "While being the last term of its series it is also outside all series. Not only does it crown, but it closes."² Escaping time and space, Omega is able to be simultaneously present at all times and at all spaces. Here is the great secret of evolution, long hidden but now revealed: Omega is the Prime Mover ahead.³ The radial energy of evolution, what we have learned is really love, has been all along the attraction of Point Omega.

The stability of the universe is not found in ever smaller units but in the highest and most complex of phenomena: in life, in consciousness, in Omega. Omega finally transcends and unifies the whole universe; it "escapes from entropy and does so more and more.»⁴

Because Omega has actuality humanity will not just unite in Omega, but will unite with Omega and so will humanity achieve its own liberation from entropy.⁵

Teilhard de Chardin is in love with the concept of Omega, his tone switching to one of hushed reverence and sensual delight when he speaks of it. For him actually, Omega was more than a concept; it was, in fact, personal, a someone, and as a someone, it could be loved. Omega is the personalization of the whole universe, the spiritual face of the world. As the combination of both the universal and the personal, it is the

³ Ibid., p. 27I. We note here that the concept of Prime Mover is given to us by Aristotle in his Metaphysics.

⁵ Ibid., pp.27I-272. Teilhard de Chardin describes how, once the critical point of reflection was crossed, a polar shift occurred. The reflexive center is able to center itself in Omega which makes death into something entirely new. "By death, in the animal, the radial is reabsorbed into the Teilhard tangential, while in man it escapes and is liberated from it. It escapes from entropy by turning back to Omega: the Hominisation of death itself."

60 fulfillment of the Spirit of the earth anticipated in Noo genesis. And, for, Teilhard de Chardin, it was still more.

In the epilogue to The Phenomenon of Man as well as in a host of other essays, Teilhard de Chardin equates Omega with Christ. He believed that he arrived at the personal Omega without deviating from his strictly phenomenological approach to reality. However, in his epilogue, Teilhard de Chardin cannot help but connect this vision with his own Christianity. In Teilhard's mind, the different spheres of knowledge: science, mysticism, philosophy, religion taken to their utmost, meet in this one point of God-Omega. In inquiry as in cosmic evolution, "Everything that rises must converge."^' The equation of Omega with Christ has the effect of christifying the whole universe. The entire evolutionary event can be imagined as a cone: Cosmo genesis blending into biogenesis blending into anthropo genesis blending into Noo genesis and finally Christo genesis reaching its peak at Omega.² Bernard TOWERS comments:

Superimposed, then, on what Teilhard called the Noosphere, there is the beginning of the Christosphere. `Christogenesis' is the process through which all men will come to share in, to form part of, the Mystical Body of Christ. And men will bring with them all the rest of that world of nature in which our human nature is inextricably bound up. Christogenesis constitutes the last stage of the evolutionary process.³

The universe is a totum in which each element is positively weaved with all the others. Man does not live in a world already arranged, but in a world which is in transformation, in progress. Commenting Teilhard de Chardin, Claude CUENOT says that this vision of the world is what is considered as Cosmogenesis:

² In an interesting twist on the concept of Christo genesis, Teilhard sees the Church as the most significant shoot of the Noosphere, a 'phylum of love' that leads the advance towards Christification, which is identical with the revelation of the mystical body of Christ.

o L'évenement le plus considérable qui se soit déroulé a la surface de la terre, c'est que nous prenons graduellement conscience du fait que le monde est en mouvement. Dans l'ensemble, l'homme avait vécu avec l'idée qu'il appartenait a un systeme déjà tout arrangé oil il se trouvait placé. Or, c'est ce systeme let qui est en train de se mettre en mouvement dans un sens d'organisation. Ce passage d'un monde conçu comme arrangé a un monde conçu comme en voie d'arrangement, c'est le passage d'une vision en cosmos a une vision en cosmogénese. »¹

Cosmo genesis is the birth and the development of the Cosmos. In the Teilhardian system, it refers to the primary stage of evolution. At this stage, the universe presents itself in the Biosphere with three important elements: Matter, Energy and Life. The world of beasts, the world of forces, and the world of stones is the Biosphere. The concept of Cosmo genesis brings forth the idea of evolution, transformism. Gradually, the universe is moving towards the Noosphere because evolution in Teilhardian metaphysics is matter serving the spirit. The material world of the Biosphere is gradually developing to reach the Noosphere, a world of complexification of human intelligence.

Teilhard de Chardin believed that in the movement of convergence, there is within us and around us, a continual heightening of consciousness in the universe. The term "Noo genesis" was coined by Teilhard de Chardin. It means the growth or development of consciousness, the coming into being of the Noosphere. Noosphere is defined as the sphere or stage of evolutionary development characterized by the emergence or dominance of consciousness, the mind, and interpersonal relationships. Noo genesis is the birth and development of the Noosphere, a world of high level of

^I Claude Cuénot, Teilhard de Chardin, écrivain de toujours, Paris, I938, p. 7I. The most important event which has occurred at the surface of the earth is that gradually, we are becoming conscious of the fact that the world is in progress. Generally, for so long, man has lived with the idea that he was part of a system already arranged and where he just happened to find himself. In fact, it is that system which is in movement in an orderly manner. The passage from the conception that the world is already arranged to the conception that the world is in progress leads us to Cosmo genesis.

62 development of consciousness. For the Jesuit priest, this theory because of the novelty it brings along is not yet established as a stronghold in the scientific field:

For a century and a half the science of physics, preoccupied with analytical researches, was dominated by the idea of the dissipation of energy and the disintegration of matter. Being now called upon by biology to consider the effects of synthesis, it is beginning to perceive that, parallel with the phenomenon of corpuscular disintegration, the Universe historically displays a second process as generalised and fundamental as the first: I mean that of the gradual concentration of its physico-chemical elements in nuclei of increasing complexity, each succeeding stage of material concentration and differentiation being accompanied by a more advanced form of spontaneity and spiritual energy. The outflowing flood of Entropy equalled and offset by the rising tide of a Noogenesis...! The greater and more revolutionary an idea, the more does it encounter resistance at its inception. Despite the number and importance of the facts that it explains, the theory of Noogenesis is still far from having established itself as a stronghold in the scientific field.^'

Nevertheless, despite this resistance, Teilhard de Chardin is confident with the fact that the theory of the Noo genesis is going to yield the awaited fruits. The first result is that it will bring about the automatic convergence of the two opposed forms of worship into which the religious impulse of Mankind is divided, namely, those who believe in the world on one hand and those who believe in God on the other.

In effect, after accepting the reality of a Noo genesis, those who believe in this World will find themselves compelled to allow increasing room, in their vision of the future, for values of personalisation and transcendency:

Of Personalisation because a Universe in process of psychic concentration is identical with a Universe that is acquiring a personality. And of transcendency because the ultimate stage of 'cosmic' personalisation, if it is to be supremely coherent and unifying, cannot be conceived otherwise than as emerging at the summit of the elements it super-personalises in uniting them to itself.²

^I Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, New York, I964, p. 78. ² Ibid., p. 79.

Teilhard de Chardin's vision is a vision of the entire cosmos, matter as well as spirit, ultimately christified.^I Omega occurs as a kind of transfiguration: the cataclysmic end of material reality as we presently know it and the birth of Omega, absolute consciousness. Cosmos becomes Christos as the Cartesian dualism of subject/object is left behind once and for all in the ultimate personalization of the universe.²

And so Teilhard de Chardin comes to the end of the drama of evolution, a unified picture of ascent from the first quarks all the way up to the cosmic body of Christ. For him, this vision has become a creed and he sums it up well in the following poem:

2.3. The Christogenesis

According to Teilhard de Chardin, the next phase of evolution is Christo genesis. This is evolution upward towards Christ, towards increasing love of God and neighbour. It began 2000 years ago, and certainly has not yet supplanted either biogenesis or Noo genesis. Christo genesis moves towards uniting all consciousness, all mankind, in unity with God. This final state was termed by Teilhard the Omega Point, using the final letter of the Greek alphabet to signify it:

Once he has been raised to the position of Prime Mover of the evolutive movement of complexity-consciousness, the cosmic-Christ becomes cosmically possible... For each one of us, every energy and everything that happens, is superanimated by his influence and his magnetic power... Cosmogenesis reveals itself, along the line of its main axis, first as Biogenesis and then Noogenesis, and finally culminates in the Christogenesis which every Christian venerates.^'

^I Humanity has a clerical role with regards to the rest of creation, recapitulating it in ourselves and therefore uniting it to Omega.

³ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Christianity and Evolution, New York, I97I, p. 96.

2.3.1. Cosmogenesis and Christogenesis

Cosmo genesis is Christo genesis. While it remains, for the most part, veiled in his phenomenological writings, there can be no doubt that Teilhard's vision of the evolution of consciousness is a Christian one. For Teilhard de Chardin, the axis and terminus of evolution is the cosmic-Christ. Instead of the two natures of Christ, he says, perhaps rashly, that Christ has three.

This third 'nature' of Christ, neither human nor divine, but cosmic," he concedes, "has not noticeably attracted the explicit attention of the faithful or of theologians.^'

Despite the paucity of modern theological attention to the cosmic Christ, Teilhard de Chardin takes courage from the company of many theologians of a stature simply unapproached in the modern world. Indeed, St. John, St. Paul and the Greek fathers all spoke passionately about this cosmic aspect of Christ. The Jesuit priest was fascinated by their words:

In the beginning was the Word f...] in Him was life and that life was the light of men f...] He was in the world and the world came into being through Him f...] May they all be one. As you Father, are in me and I am in you, may he also be in us f...] When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him, so that God may be all in all f...] He has set forth Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth... And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.^'

Reflecting on these and similar passages, Teilhard de Chardin felt the need to expand the church's traditional view of Christ in order that he might remain the Christ of Paul and John. We no longer live in the static cosmos of the first century but in a

65 Cosmo genesis; the grand cosmic Pauline, Johanine and Patristic visions must now be appropriately reinterpreted. He declares:

Christ is in the church in the same way as the sun is before our eyes. We see the same sun as our fathers saw and yet we understand it in a much more magnificent way.^'

The magnificent new understanding of an evolving cosmos highlights for us the cosmic aspect of Christ within an evolutionary universe. For Teilhard de Chardin, Christ is the organic centre of evolution; it is the love of Christ that draws Cosmo genesis ever onward and upward. Christ is "co-extensive with the vastness of space" and "commensurate with the abyss of time" and "radiates his influence throughout the whole mass of nature."² This is what it means to be Alpha and Omega: Christ is the beginning and the end of the process of cosmic evolution and he is its animating energy fully present every point along the way.

Given all of this it is fair to ask if this cosmic-Christ of evolution is still the Jesus Christ who taught along dusty Galilean roads. Teilhard de Chardin insists on the fact that the cosmic Christ and the historical Jesus are one and the same, a conclusion that he supports by an appeal to the necessity of the incarnation. For universal convergence and Christification, Christ had to be inserted historically into the evolutionary process.

The more one considers that the fundamental laws of evolution, the more one becomes convinced that the universal Christ would not be able to appear at the end of time, unless he had previously inserted himself into the course of the world's movement by way of birth, in the form of an element. If it is really by Christ-Omega that the universe is held in movement... it is from his concrete source, the Man of Nazareth, that Christ-Omega (theoretically and historically) derives for our experience his whole stability.³

² Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Christianity and Evolution, New York, I97I, p. 88.

³ Quoted in the work of Norbertus Maximilaan Wildiers, An Introduction to Teilhard de Chardin., New York, I968, p.I37.

As Norbertus Maximilaan Wildiers adds, "In other words: without a historic Christ there could be no mystical body of Christ, no total Christ." ¹ Jesus of Nazareth is indeed the Christ of the cosmos. Teilhard de Chardin speaks far more about the Pantokrator than the man of Galilee, but they are still the same cosmic, divine and supremely attractive person.

2.3.2. Christogenesis and the Parousia

There is a further objection raised by those uncomfortable with Teilhard de Chardin's idea that the Parousia coincides with evolutionary consummation. After all, a natural process culminating in Christo genesis sounds little like the second coming of tradition. True, Teilhard de Chardin allows, but this unfamiliarity is no sign of illegitimacy. Teilhard de Chardin considers Christ's first coming: Could there have been a Jesus of Nazareth without the long labor of evolution to produce humanity, or more specifically, a Mary? No, he answers. "Christ needs to find a summit of the world for his consummation just as he needed to find a woman for his conception."² Even as in Mary the supernatural and the natural met, so too must Christo genesis be a meeting place of the natural, the Noo genesis and the supernatural, the Parousia. And so Christ emerges as the organic peak and cosmic power of the evolutionary process. He is at once evolution's author, creator, animator and mover, director and leader, center and head, its consistence and consolidation, its gatherer and assembler, purifier and regenerator, crown and consummation, its spear-head and its end. And, lest we forget, Teilhard de Chardin reminds us that

The universal Christ in whom my personal faith finds satisfaction is none other than the authentic expression of the Christ of the gospel. Christ renewed, it is true, by contact with the modern world, but at the same time Christ become even greater in order still to remain the same Christ.³

^I Norbertus Maximilaan Wildiers, An Introduction to Teilhard de Chardin., New York, I968, p. I37.

² Quoted in the book of Christopher F. Mooney, Teilhard de Chardin and the Mystery of Christ, London, I966, p. 62. See also Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, p. 22.

³ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Christianity and Evolution, New York, I97I, p. I29.

Teilhard de Chardin wonders at this God of Cosmo genesis, consistence and union in the following words:

Who, then is this God, no longer the God of the old Cosmos but the God of the new Cosmogenesis--so constituted precisely because the effect of a mystical operation that has been going on for two thousand years has been to disclose in you, beneath the Child of Bethlehem and the Crucified, the moving Principle and the all-embracing Nucleus of the World itself? Who is this God for whom our generation looks so eagerly? Who but you, Jesus, who represent him and bring him to us? Lord of consistence and union, you whose distinguishing mark and essence is the power indefinitely to grow greater, without distortion or loss of continuity, to the measure of the mysterious Matter whose Heart you fill and all whose movement you ultimately control--Lord of my childhood and Lord of my last days... sweep away the last clouds that still hide you... Let your universal Presence spring forth in a blaze that is at once Diaphany and Fire. 0 ever-greater Christ^'

In fact, the world is evolving, the elements are gathering up together in order to become one. Teilhard de Chardin would then consider the problem of the one and the manifold, plurality and unity, and he will insist on the fact that civilizations, cultures, human races, men and women are able to unite despite their differences in order to build up the Civilization of the Universal. Instead of being pessimistic as Samuel Huntington who described the clash of civilizations², Teilhard de Chardin describes the general movement of civilizations not in terms of a clash, but in terms of convergence. In fact, Samuel Philips Huntington declared:

^I Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Heart of Matter, New York, I979, pp. 57-58.

² Samuel Huntington wrote a book entitled The Clash of Civilizations in which he considers that human relationships at an international level are characterised by conflicts.

It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation-states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future. The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.^'

In all optimism, Teilhard de Chardin believed in a better future and was already foreseeing what has come to be developed nowadays as globalisation. After considering Panmobilism in the metaphysical field, with the theories of Heraclitus and the Teilhardian development of consciousness, time has now come to consider Pan-humanmobilism and this is the object of our third chapter.

As earlier stated, Panmobilism is the theory that affirms that all the elements in the universe are in movement. From a metaphysical point of view, all beings, all that exists is in perpetual movement and in perpetual change. This theory was developed by Heraclitus who affirmed that one cannot step twice into the same river. With Teilhard de Chardin, this theory finds its fulfilment with its application to human beings, real men and women and takes the shape of a panhuman convergence towards the Omega point. As such, Panmobilism leaves the mere metaphysical sphere in order to be considered in a moral and political point of view. In effect, Teilhard de Chardin affirms:

The world of human thought today presents a very remarkable spectacle, if we choose to take note of it. Joined in an inexplicable unifying movement men who are utterly opposed in education and in faith find themselves brought together, intermingled, in their common passion for a double truth: namely, that there exists a physical Unity of beings, and that they themselves are living and active parts of it.¹

Despite the divergent and opposed conditions of people, they are still being drawn in a unifying movement; despite their differences, they are still able to come together in a unity that accepts difference and diversity. This is the convergence of all peoples, all civilizations towards the ultimate point of unity, the Omega Point, centre of all convergence. This movement is inevitable and imposes itself to humanity. It does not depend on peoples but what depends on them is the manner in which they are to be drawn through this movement. They will either accept to join in a cooperative way or they will be dragged by coercion because the panhuman convergence is an irreversible phenomenon.

3.1. For a racial morality

In order to posit the nuts and bolts of a racial morality, Teilhard de Chardin is faced with a problem: How can the peoples of the earth achieve harmony unless they first agree upon the basis of their union? And how can they find the ardour and courage to perform their duty, once perceived, if they do not feel some attraction to it? He wonders:

L..] there is a grave uncertainty to be resolved. The future, I have said, depends on the courage and resourcefulness which men display in overcoming the forces of isolationism, even of repulsion, which seem to drive them apart rather than draw them together. How is the drawing together to be accomplished? How shall we so contrive matters that the human mass merges in a single whole, instead of ceaselessly scattering in dust?^'

A priori, in Teilhard de Chardin's opinion, there seems to be two methods, two possible roads in order to build up this collectivisation of mankind.² The first is a process of tightening-up in response to external pressures. The human mass, because it is in a state of continuous additive growth, in number and inter-connections, on the confined surface of this planet, must automatically become more and more firmly concentrated upon itself. To this impressive process of natural compression there may well be added the artificial constraint imposed by a stronger human group upon a weaker; we have only to look around us at the present time, nowadays, to see how this idea is seeking, indeed rushing towards its realisation. Many countries still behave as masters over others. What is the '08' all about? Why is it that some countries for example, have the right to own the atomic bomb and not others?

^I Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, New York, I964, p. 76. ² Id.

Yet, there is another way. This is that, prompted by some favouring influence, the elements of mankind should succeed in making effective a profound force of mutual attraction, deeper and more powerful than the surface repulsion which causes them to diverge, forced upon one another by the dimensions and mechanics of the earth, men will purposefully bring to life a common soul in this vast body. And so, the two possible roads are the following: "unification by external or by internal force? Compulsion or Unanimity?"^'

In his days, Teilhard de Chardin experienced the destruction of war and for him, war expressed the tension and the interior dislocation of mankind shaken to its roots as it stood at the crossroads, faced by the need to decide upon its future.

3.1.1. Unity in unanimity

Instead of humanity to unite through compulsion, since unity imposes itself, the collectivisation of mankind being an unavoidable process, it must unite in total freedom. Learning from the miseries of the past with the world wars, for example, humans must unite in a unanimous spirit. The road to be followed therefore is the road of freedom; we are supposed to engage in the process of totalisation consciously and freely. In effect, Teilhard de Chardin declares:

In my view the road to be followed is clearly revealed by the teaching of all the past. We can progress only by uniting: this, as we have seen, is the law of life. But unification through coercion leads only to a superficial pseudo-unity. It may establish a mechanism, but it does not achieve any fundamental synthesis; and in consequence it engenders no growth of consciousness. It materialises, in short, instead of spiritualising. Only unification through unanimity is biologically valid. This alone can work the miracle of causing heightened personality to emerge from the forces of collectivity. It alone represents a genuine extension of the psychogenesis that gave us birth. Therefore it is inwardly that we must come together, and in entire freedom.2

The Teilhardian view here reminds us of the Stoic notion of freedom. In fact, happiness consists in obeying nature, living like the gods, living according to the spark of divinity in us, living according to reason. As such, man's happiness consists in following without restraint the prescriptions of Nature. In a determined world, the stoic is still free. He is free to follow nature or not to do so. Like a dog tied behind the chariot, man is supposed to choose to run step by step, following the cadence of the chariot, in all freedom in order to find satisfaction behind the chariot, instead of resisting and ending up being dragged by force. The process of totalisation imposes itself to us and our happiness consists in uniting in all freedom, in all unanimity in order to avoid being yanked by coercion.

3.1.2. Unity in diversity

There is no hesitation that humanity, taken in its concrete nature, is really composed of different races. Human races exist, but this needs not give room for any antagonism or racism. In effect, there is no need for us to try to deny our differences. Teilhard de Chardin wonders:

Why should we deny them? Are the children of one family all equally strong or intelligent? Peoples are biologically equal, as `thought of phyla' destined progressively to integrate in some final unity, which will be the one true humanity. But they are not yet equal to the totality of their physical gifts and mind. And is it not just this diversity that gives each one its value? One has this, another has that. Otherwise, why and how should we speak of a synthesis of all?^I

We cannot but acknowledge the fact that people are different like chalk and cheese. Even the children of the same family are not all equally strong or equally intelligent. People are equal by their biological value, as "phyla of thought" destined to progress together; but they are not equal in their physical and spiritual talents. This

diversity is what gives merit to each and every one. If it were not so, one could not talk about a synthesis of all.

In order to lay a foundation of a racial morality, we are called to acknowledge our differences. People are all equal in dignity, but each individual person is different from another in terms of talents, temperament, character and personality. We cannot but accept this fact in order to talk about the Civilization of the Universal, or about globalisation, where there is a synthesis of all human races. It is therefore important for us to point out here with Teilhard de Chardin, the error of feminism. Woman is not man, and it is precisely for this reason that man cannot do it all alone, without woman. A mechanic for example, is not a football player, or an artist, or a farmer; and it is thanks to these diversities that the national organism functions. Similarly, a Cameroonian is not a Frenchman, nor is a Frenchman a Chinese or Japanese. This is most providential for the total prosperity and future of man.

It is important to note with Teilhard de Chardin that these inequalities and or differences may appear as detrimental so long as the elements are regarded statically and in isolation. Observed however from the point of view of their essential complementarity, they become acceptable, honourable, and even welcome. Will the eye ever say that it despises the hand?

Once this functional diversity of human races is admitted, in Teilhard de Chardin's opinion, two things follow instantly. The first is that the duty of each race is not to preserve or rediscover some indefinable original purity in the past but to complete itself in the future, according to its own qualities and values. The second is that in this drive towards collective personalisation, aid must be sought from each of the neighbouring branches of civilization.

3.1.3. Unity and not Identity

In the Teilhardian world view, human races are complementary. No race is supposed to claim superiority over others. In this way, Teilhard de Chardin goes against Levy-Bruhl, Hume, Hegel, Arthur de Gobineau, Heide gger and Gusdorf, just to name some western thinkers, who had considered the African, especially the Negro-African race, as inferior to other races. Teilhard de Chardin avers:

Races, countries, nations, states, cultures, linguistic groups ; all the superimposed or juxtaposed, concordant or discordant, isolated or anastomosed entities are to the same degree, though on different planes, nataral; for they represent the direct extensions, in man and on the human scale, of the general process included by biology under the name of evolution..^I

As a palaeontologist and cosmologist, Teilhard de Chardin tends to reconcile East and West. The egocentric racial ideal of one branch or one race draining off for itself alone all the sap of the tree and rising over the death of other branches is therefore false and against nature. In order that the tree reaches the sun, nothing less is required than the combined growth of the entire foliage. From this analogy of the branches of a tree which cooperate to reach the sun and therefore enhancing the tree's growth, Teilhard de Chardin avers:

The outcome of the world, the gates of the future, the entry into the super-human - these are not thrown open to a few of the privileged nor to one chosen people to the exclusion of all others. They will open to an advance of all together, in a direction in which all together* can join and find completion in a spiritual renovation of the earth, a renovation whose physical degree of reality we must now consider and whose outline we must make clearer .2

*In the footnote of this text that we have quoted, Teilhard de Chardin notes: "Even if they do so only under the influence of a few, an elite."

Hence, collectivisation is not the work of some privileged cultures or human races or civilizations. The doors of the future are going to open themselves only through the impulse of all the civilizations together. The Civilization of the Universal is not for some peoples, but it is the work of all though some may lead the others in this panhuman convergence.

Since we are all from the same species, we must work to build up a common mind and avoid racism. The increase of human consciousness favours forces that tend towards dissolution but this is countered according to Teilhard de Chardin, by a planetary impulse towards solidarity: the Civilization of the Universal.

An ecumenical view of humanity emerged clearly in Teilhard de Chardin's mind during his days. The call for the Civilization of the Universal is based here on his principle that union differentiates in order to neutralize all forms of racism. The collective must be personalized in order to heal the cleavage. Individual races must become collective-minded.

The various races of man, in so far as we can still distinguish between them, in spite of their convergence, are not biologically equal but different and complementary like children of the same family. And there is no doubt that it is even to this very genetic diversity that we must attribute the extreme biological richness of mankind. Each race must therefore strive to keep its identity, because the Civilization of the Universal means unity in diversity and not fusion in identity. With all confidence, Teilhard de Chardin thus says:

There is nothing in this, I think, to hurt anyone's pride: provided, of course, that each one of us understands (like each member of a family), that the only thing that ultimately matters is the general triumph of all mankind by which I mean that globally it shall attain the higher term of its planetary evolution...They accuse me of being a racialist, I am not. For the racialist, mankind is divided into higher and lower races, any fusion of the two being immoral and degrading. The biologically inferior races have, for him, only one useful purpose, to perform the meaner tasks, and humanity will never attain unity.^I

^I Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, in Cuénot, C., Teilhard de Chardin, London, I965, p. 30I.

Though different, all races are complementary and equal in dignity. In effect, there are in Teilhard de Chardin's vision, some races that act as the leading light of evolution and others that have reached a dead end. Mankind is evolving towards a form of totalisation, and this process necessarily entails a particular role for every race. The various races, though different, are capable of coming together in synthesis. These races must therefore share

[...] an attitude of sympathetic collaboration in a unanimous effort towards "ultra humanization", for which every shade of humanity needs the others in order to attain maturity.^I

There is in fact a moral effort needed in order that this collaboration among races may take place effectively. Teilhard de Chardin states:

K Pour s'unifier et se concentrer en soi-même, l'être doit rompre beaucoup d'attaches nuisibles. Pour s'unifier avec les autres et se donner a eux, il doit porter atteinte, en apparence, aux privautés, les plus jalousement cultivées, de son esprit et de son cmur. Pour accéder a une vie supérieure, en se centrant sur un autre lui-même, il doit briser en soi une unité provisoire. [...] L'effort moral est nécessairement accompagné de douleur, de sacrifice. »²

Human relationships are so complex that one needs to be very careful in relating with the other person. There is a constant moral effort that is needed. This entails a great spirit of sacrifice. Coming up together in view of the Civilization of the Universal is not something so easy. Accepting the values of the other culture or human race is not given. History teaches us how the African race had always been considered as less human than the others and it is on this basis that western man came to colonize the black man in order to 'humanize' and 'rationalize' him.

² Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Ecrits du temps de la guerre (I9I6-I9I9), Paris, I965, p. I95. In order to come to unite to itself, a being must cut itself off from all kinds of harmful bounds. In order to come to unity with other beings and to offer itself to them, it must harm its own being, the familiarities of his heart and of his mind. In order to come to a superior form of life, centring on itself, it must temporally break its self-unity. A moral effort necessarily entails some pain and some sacrifice.

Claude Cuénot tells us that the views of Teilhard de Chardin on the complementarity and collaboration of human races were not accepted at UNESCO for example, though he maintained his friendship with Julian Huxley, the Chairman.^I

3.2. The point of Universal convergence

It was without any doubt one of Teilhard de Chardin's most cherished convictions that the cosmos as a whole is somehow converging towards the Omega Point²:

L..] in the heart of a universe prolonged along its axis of complexity, there is a divine centre of convergence. That nothing may be prejudged, and in order to stress its synthesizing and personalising function, let us call it the point Omega.³

He felt that cosmic evolution must have a term, and that this end can only be conceived as a point or centre of universal convergence. Mary LINSCOTT expresses this fact when she avers:

Socialisation energised by love and leading towards unification prepares the consummation of the world but it is a process which cannot go on for ever, Teilhard holds that everything that rises must converge and, when he projects the curve of evolution into the future, he postulates a final convergence which will be the culmination of evolution: the fullness both of the unity of the species and the personalisation of the individual. This is the pleroma seen as the completion of the scientific phenomenon of evolution. Teilhard calls it the Omega point.⁴

It is evident therefore that it is evolution that depends on Omega and not the reverse. Teilhard de Chardin takes his final step and identifies Omega with Christ. Faith

78 had to go on to identify the Omega of scientific deduction with the cosmic Christ of revelation and, in this light; the transformation of the world became the fullness of evolution not only as a scientific phenomenon but as a Christian phenomenon too. In effect, in the process of totalisation, the Omega of evolution is to be identified with the Christ of Revelation:

If the world is convergent and if Christ occupies its centre, then the Christogenesis of St. Paul and St. John is nothing else and nothing less than the extension, both awaited and unhoped for, of that noogenesis in which Cosmogenesis culminates.^'

Hence, the divine Omega is rooted in the Person of Christ, source and object of love, through whom mankind is destined to achieve its ultimate unity on a new plane of being. The Prime Mover to speak like Aristotle, the centre of the Civilization of the Universal, actuates all the energies of the universe. Epoch-making as it may be, the scientific recognition of an Omega Point as the ultimate term of Cosmo genesis was for Teilhard de Chardin the first major step towards an even more momentous discovery: the realization, namely, that the Omega Point of Science coincides in reality with Christ. What appears to the eye of science as a universal centre of attraction and confluence is in reality none other than the cosmic Christ of Saint Paul:

It was to be the work, and the constant joy of the next 20 years to see, step by step, and keeping pace with one another, two convictions build up around me, each gaining strength from the other: Christic "density" and the "cosmic density" of a world whose "communicative power" I could see increasing with the increase in its "power of convergence"...The heart of "amorized" matter, of matter impregnated with love.²

In Teilhardian metaphysics, the layers of matter considered as separate elements no less than as a whole, tauten and converge by synthesis. It is not simply a question of

^I Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, in Cuenot, C., Teilhard de Chardin, London, I965, p. 297. ² Ibid., p. 375.

79 isolated regions detaching themselves from the rest of the cosmos, but of a universal convergence to a single Apex, the Omega Point.^I

First, Omega is a pole. It is a centre in itself and it is not directly comprehensible to us even though its divine nature allows us to formulate the conditions which must be met in order that it fulfils its role. Omega must be supremely present, with a mastery over time and chance and it must be a personalizing focus, a Person distinct from all persons whom it completes in unifying.

Secondly, Omega must be conceived as a summit of transcendence, a primeval transcendence, a transcendent reality. Omega must also be looked at as a centre of centres, a centre of a superior order which waits for us, no longer besides us, but also apart and above us.

The main reasons for the nature and function of the Omega Point are based on love and love is the highest energy that can personalize by totalisation: it is the highest form of radial energy:

Love is the most universal, the most formidable and the most mysterious of cosmic energies. [...] The progress towards Man, through Woman, is in fact the progress of the whole universe. The vital concern for Earth [...] is that these bearings be established.^'

For human beings, "love alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves".³

Omega is thus the pinnacle of humanisation, the summit of the Civilization of the Universal. The final union of the converging forces of evolution must entail not repression or diminution, but expansion and fulfilment. Omega must therefore be a supreme centration, the focus in which are united without any loss of identity all the individual centres of men, taking up into themselves the full development of the material cosmos.

² Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, in Cuénot, C., Teilhard de Chardin, London, I965, p. II2.

According to Teilhard de Chardin, "autonomy, actuality, irreversibility, and thus, finally, transcendence are the four attributes of Omega".^I All these four attributes simply refer to a Perfect Being in whom the universe is personalized by His very nature.

Omega is not a potential centre, but something real and already in existence and only a sufficiently high degree of socialisation will enable man to reflect it. The ultra-reflection, which is the way through which men could reach the Omega Point, is the third and final stage of reflection after the birth of consciousness in man and the stage of co-reflection. Teilhard de Chardin stresses the fact that the ultra-reflection does not consist in bringing all men into a single supra-consciousness in such a way that their personal identity and their individuality would disappear. Every gigantic effort to reduce the multitude of mankind to some order seems to have ended by slitting the human person, because none is higher than each man's personal consciousness and freedom.

3.3. Psychosocial evolution and the hyperpersonal organisation

In human or psychosocial evolution, convergence has led to increased complexity. In the Teilhardian view, the increase of human numbers combined with the improvement of human communications has fused all the parts of the Noosphere together, has increased the tension within it, and has caused it to become 'unfolded' upon itself, and therefore more highly organised. In the process of panhuman convergence and even panhuman coalescence, the psychosocial temperature rises. Mankind as a whole will accordingly achieve more intense, more complex, and more integrated mental activity, which can guide the human species up the path of progress to higher levels of Hominisation.²

In an unlimited environment, man's thought and his resultant psychosocial activity would simply diffuse outwards: it would extend over a greater area, but would remain thinly spread. Nevertheless, when it is confined to spreading out over the surface of a sphere, idea will encounter idea, and the result will be an organised web of thought,

² Julian Huxley in the introduction to The Phenomenon of Man, New York, 1959, p. 17.

81 a noetic system operating under high tension, a piece of evolutionary machinery capable of generating high psychosocial energy. This psychosocial energy leads to a hyperpersonal mode of organisation.

Julian Huxley tells us that the concept of a hyperpersonal mode of organisation sprang from Teilhard de Chardin's conviction of the supreme importance of personality:

A developed human being, as he rightly pointed out, is not merely a more highly individualized individual. He has crossed the threshold of self-consciousness to a new mode of thought, and as a result has achieved some degree of conscious integration -- integration of the self with the outer world of men and nature, integration of the separate elements of the self with each other. He is a person, an organism which has transcended individuality in personality. This attainment of personality was an essential element in man's past and present evolutionary success: accordingly its fuller achievement must be an essential aim for his evolutionary future.^'

Henceforth, the passage from one's individual consciousness in order to achieve some degree of integration with others in a broader plane, leads to a convergence of all towards the achievement of the civilization of the universal which is a panhuman convergence towards the Omega Point. As Richard Laurent OMGBA tells us,

A Le terme civilisation de l'universel est emprunte au theologien et philosophe francais Pierre Teilhard de Chardin qui tentait de montrer dans l'entre-deux-guerres, que le mouvement general des civilisations les portait vers une convergence panhumaine. » 2

^I Julian Huxley in the introduction to The Phenomenon of Man, New York, I959, p. I9.

² Richard Laurent Omgba, A Identité culturelle, civilisation de l'Universel et Mondialisation p, in Marcelin Vounda E., (ed.), Le Siècle de Senghor, Yaounde, 2003, p. 47. The concept of the Civilization of the Universal is given to us by the French theologian and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who asserted in between the two world wars that the general movement of civilizations was drawing them towards a panhuman convergence.

The Civilization of the Universal is the drawing up of all cultures, all civilizations towards a point of universal convergence, the Omega point. As such, there is no civilization which can claim to be the universal civilization. This convergence is the work of all human races, all cultures and all civilizations. It entails not only the recognition of the other but also the knowledge and the recognition of the self. The Civilization of the Universal is a futurist vision of the world that was announced by the French theologian, scholar, and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. His idea was largely spread because of its humanistic and optimistic elements.

CONCLUSION

The metaphysics of Teilhard de Chardin mostly expressed in The Phenomenon of Man is a brilliant synthesis of Christianity with evolution, arguing very cogently that Christianity not only fits naturally into evolution, but is in fact the real purpose of it all. Teilhard de Chardin accepted the possibility of other levels of consciousness that we don't understand yet. To deal with such levels, he had to invent new words and/or resort to metaphors. In order to appreciate Teilhard's vision, it is first necessary to understand his basic concepts: Noo genesis, Noosphere, Cosmo genesis, Christo genesis, convergence, Omega point and complexification. The key thing that Teilhard de Chardin recognized is that there is more to life, nature and the universe than the eye or instruments can reveal. He invites each of us to step up with him beyond the merely "real" to a "complex plane" of thought on a higher level. The future of evolution is more interesting than the past, and Teilhard de Chardin is one of very few people ever to look over the horizon. Interpreting the future of evolution is necessarily a matter of speculation; the most optimistic of the futurists is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The model envisioned by Teilhard de Chardin has been variously denounced, criticized, accepted, praised or endorsed by various observers, but it has seldom been understood. Original Teilhardian words like Noosphere are commonly regarded as a nice literary device, but are not taken seriously. In order to enhance understanding of central Teilhardian concepts such as complexification, centration, the within and without, it is important to go back to the Phenomenon of man which is a purely metaphysics work. The way in which we learn mathematics, growing from a simple to a complex understanding as our level of information grows, is presented as an analogy for the kind of growth in complexity that Teilhard de Chardin proposes and his vision beyond our present horizon seems to be very plausible.

INTRODUCTION

Heraclitus and Parmenides represent two opposed views as far as evolution is concerned. According to Heraclitus, things are in perpetual movement, we are moving; whereas according to Parmenides, being is static, nothing changes; we are not moving at all. The denial of change, evolution, development and progress leads to pessimism. For those who are pessimistic towards the future, nothing appears to have changed since man began to hand down the memory of the past or the forms of life. The ever-growing movement of evil in the form of all kinds of violence and hatred seems to confirm this pessimistic attitude that could lead one to affirm that the future is not bright, the future will never be bright as the present situation and the past situation of mankind is and has been characterised by violence and hatred. In this light, Teilhard de Chardin affirms:

[...] (Immobility has never inspired anyone with enthusiasm!) [...] Human suffering, vice and war, although they may momentarily abate, recur from age to age with an increasing virulence. Even the striving after progress contributes to the sum of evil: to effect change is to undermine the painfully established traditional order whereby the distress of living creatures was reduced to a minimum. What innovator has not re-tapped the springs of blood and tears? For the sake of human tranquillity, in the name of Fact, and in defence of the sacred Established Order, the immobilists forbid the earth to move. Nothing changes, they say, or can change. The raft must drift purposelessly on a shoreless sea.^'

Teilhard de Chardin in The Future of man does not insist on the clash of civilizations², but on the dialogue of civilizations. Our work in this second part is to bring out the optimistic views of Teilhard de Chardin.

² Samuel Huttington wrote a book entitled The Clash of Civilizations, a pessimistic view of human interactions.

Teilhard de Chardin witnessed both the First and the Second World Wars. In his days, the various ethnic unities of the world appeared to be in bristling hostility to one another. This antagonism among peoples, in which he was caught, seemed to give a final knock to whoever dreamed of a unification of the universe. The world in his days was characterised by repulsion, isolation and fragmentation and this was revealed by wars and conflicts. Despite this situation of conflict and divergence, Teilhard de Chardin remained optimistic towards the future. In The Vision of the Past, we read:

Believers in the existence of human progress remain scandalized and disconcerted by the revival of racialism. This outbreak of egoistic violence, they think, condemns their dearest hopes. But could one not maintain, on the contrary, that in so far as it satisfies a preliminary condition necessary for their realization, it actually justifies them?^'

As such, there is no need for mankind to despair; the general movement of evolution - we are moving towards the Omega Point - will bring mankind together under the phenomenon of the panhuman convergence, the civilization of the universal. In this chapter, we would like to consider the conflict situation among civilizations, the movement towards union, and the value of Pan-human-mobilism in fulfilling optimistic hopes towards the future of mankind.

4.1. The conflict situation

The Twentieth Century is behind us. It was the most violent century in the history of mankind. It was also the one to see the most rapid scientific and technical advances. It included two World Wars and the Holocaust. It saw Genocides. It produced and used Nuclear and Chemical Weapons. It has been a century torn by strife. The contradictions between peace and war could not have been sharper. Still, the results do not turn out as they should, and the number of wars refuses to approach the zero mark. Today we record some twenty to thirty major armed conflicts a year. To these we can add minor armed conflicts, terrorist group activities, riots and unrest in all parts of the world. This might be less than was observed five years ago, which provides some consolation, though it also makes clear that the question of war is not about to leave us; war, as Heraclitus said, is really the father of all things as it is always present in the history of mankind.

The First World War was started in the spirit of "war as an adventure," which could be ended whenever the participants wanted but that is not what happened. The actual destruction was terrible beyond imagining. The images changed dramatically, and - once the carnage had ended - the slogan instead became: "No More War." Considerable efforts were put in to prevent the recurrence of war. The League of Nations was one approach. A new war followed, nonetheless, but this time it was not celebrated as a noble task but regarded as a necessary or inevitable outcome of events. Since the Second World War, war has increasingly been analyzed in terms of a security dilemma. The basic notion is that nobody wants war, but the defensive measures set up by one side are interpreted as offensive by the other side. Preparing for peace seems to lead to tension and even to war. The Cold War was seen as such as a dilemma. It appeared difficult for any party to break out of the vicious circle created by the arms race and the escalatory potential of crises.

Teilhard de Chardin bears witness to the fact that some peoples of the earth have lived in fear of one another and even in conflict. He imagines that these forces of opposition lying in every human unit in Europe or in Asia, were then in gestation and that they wanted to come out, neither to oppose nor crush themselves, but to unite, come together and to fertilize themselves. He says inter alia:

We are now beginning to feel it in us, and to observe it in our neighbours: before the last disturbances that shook the earth, the peoples scarcely lived other than on the surface; a world of energies was still sleeping in each of them. Well, these powers are, I imagine, still hidden; and at the heart of each natural human unity, in Europe, in Asia, everywhere, they are at this moment moving and trying to reach the light of day: not, I conclude, in order to fight and devour one another, but to rejoin and fertilize one another. Fully conscious nations are needed for a united earth.^'

There has been a remarkable consensus on the need for containing conflict and even on the need for contributing to solving conflict. International organizations have acquired a stronger role than ever before in matters of global security and peace. The "international community" has emerged as a new constellation. Its record is mixed, but the negative attitude to war remains: Wars should not take place, and the world as a whole should contribute to their elimination. The lessons of the 20th century have truly changed the perspectives on waging war. This is definitely a step towards union and peace.

4.2. A step towards union

The apparent conflict situation in the world is just a step towards a union by dissension and gradually, all races are becoming aware of their duties towards one another. The twentieth century bore witness to Democratization, Welfare Societies, increased Gender Equality, Human Rights, and Non-violent resistance. Despite the many wars, it was a century when more was done than ever before to move the world away from war. Peace movements, international organizations, the United Nations

^I Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Vision of the Past, London, I966, pp. 209-2I0.

89 (UN), the European Union (EU), and arms control efforts, were but a few of such measures. There were also treaties on conduct among States and peace agreements to solve underlying problems. There is therefore, according to Teilhard de Chardin, no room for discouragement, since the process of globalisation will have to take a long period of time. What we need is patience and optimism:

Now, at the present moment, we are a prey to the forces of divergence. But let us not despair [...] For order to establish itself over human differentiation, it will undoubtedly need a long alternation of expansions and concentrations, separations and comings together. We find ourselves hic et nunc in a phase of extreme divergence, the prelude to such a convergence as has never yet been on earth. This is all that I want to say. This, if I am right, is what is happening.^'

In fact, Teilhard de Chardin seems to be right, there is an increasing awareness that the world is a community, a planetary village and we have learned through the bitter experiences of the twentieth century that war is not the first option, that it does not work to resolve problems, and that there are other ways of dealing with conflicts among human beings. Yet, we are still faced with a sizeable number of local wars and armed conflicts especially in the Middle East, in Africa and Asia. Apparently these lessons have not been brought home to the leaderships in their disputes. Pan-humanmobilism in effecting values such as human rights, humanitarian perspectives and democratization will take time, more especially because we are in the phase of extreme divergence. The phase of extreme divergence which is characteristic of human races and the world today is just a prelude to such a convergence, that is, the Civilization of the Universal as has never yet been on earth. In fact, according to Teilhard de Chardin, every move we make to isolate ourselves presses us closer together. So, in spite of quarrels and conflicts which it disturbs and saddens us to see, the idea that a concentration of humanity is taking place in the world and that, far from breaking it up, we are increasingly coming together, is not an absurd one, it is very significant.

4.3. The Significance and Value of Pan-human-mobilism

In his consideration of the panhuman convergence, Teilhard de Chardin is confident. He perceives a great event foreshadowed: the collectivisation of mankind, the Pan- human- mobilism. Despite the resistance that is opposed to the phenomenon which will build the earth and spiritualize nations with love, despite individualism and egoism which characterises modern man, the planetisation of mankind will definitely take place. He avers:

Although our individualistic instincts may rebel against this drive towards the collective, they do so in vain and wrongly. In vain because no power in the world can enable us to escape from what is in itself the power of the world. And wrongly because the real nature of this impulse that is sweeping us towards a state of super-organisation is such as to make us more completely personalised and human.¹

There is no force on earth that can escape that which is the force of the earth. The movement which carries us along tends by nature to make us completely human. Ipso facto, we are called to obey to this inner drive of the universe, which seeks to make us one and if we become aware of this profound ordering of things, we will be able to allow human collectivisation to pass beyond the enforced phase, where it now is, to the free phase: that in which men, having learnt in consequence to love the preordained forces that unite them, a natural union of affinity and sympathy will supersede the forces of compulsion. Teilhard de Chardin asserts that the phenomenon of planetisation of humankind falls in several aspects: geographical, ethnical, economical and even psychical.

Geographically, since 1939, a vast expanse of the earth, the region of the Pacific, hitherto on the fringe of civilization, has for practical purposes entered irrevocably into the orbit of industrialised nations. Mechanised masses of men have invaded the southern seas, and up-to-date airfields have been

^I Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, New York, I964, pp. I24-I25.

permanently installed on what were the poetically lost islands of Polynesia.^I

Ethnically, during the same space of time, there has been a vast and pitiless confusion of peoples, whole armies being removed from one hemisphere to the other, and tens of thousands of refugees being scattered across the world like seed borne on the wind. Brutal and harsh though the circumstances have been who can fail to perceive the inevitable consequences of this new striving of the human dough?²

Economically and psychically the entire mass of mankind, under the inexorable pressure of events and owing to the prodigious growth and speeding up of the means of communication, has found itself seized in the mould of a communal existence³

According to Teilhard de Chardin, this process of collectivisation of mankind is unavoidable:

Whether we like it or not, from the beginning of our history and through all the interconnected forces of Matter and Spirit, the process of our collectivisation has ceaselessly continued, slowly or in jerks, gaining ground each day. That is the fact of the matter. It is impossible for Mankind not to unite upon itself as it is for the human intelligence not to go on indefinitely deepening its thought...Instead of seeking, against all the evidence, to deny or disparage the reality of this grand phenomenon, we do better to accept it frankly. 4

Teilhard de Chardin says that this Hominsation ^I of the world, seen to be allied to a very strange characteristic, which suggests that there is something to be discovered scientifically in man that is even more interesting than the manifestation of a cosmic property or the product of evolution, is irreversible². Despite the accumulated improbabilities that its progress presupposes, it has continually been increasing in our world and what can be seen in mankind today is precisely its climax. We cannot stop or turn back from what is taking shape and gathering speed around us, indeed, it is an unavoidable process.

In effect, we do experience today progress in human collectivisation. Countries tend to build up international organisations in order to make unity among them more effective. What the Western world experiences today through the European Union, is a tangible proof that humanity is moving towards the Civilization of the Universal, though much still needs to be done in the whole world. Teilhard de Chardin is a forecaster. He had already foreseen a certain planetisation of mankind in his days. Is it not what globalisation is all about? This is the Civilization of the Universal, a rendezvous where each culture has something to offer and to receive as well. This will continue to take place gradually. Evolution has not come to an end, mankind is still in progress, in progress towards a better future, a future of peace, unity, freedom, the respect of human dignity and human rights, the reduction of the gap existing between the countries of the centre, the rich countries of the North, and the countries of the periphery, poor countries of the third world. Globalisation in bringing different civilizations together in a unity and not uniformity, unity in diversity, and in harmonising human relationships by easing communication through the new technologies of communication and information and more especially through the Internet, will contribute enormously to the betterment of the condition of mankind as a whole. Yet, more still needs to be done in the actual state of affairs which presents globalisation as the Americanisation, or the Westernisation of the planet.

^I Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Science et Christ, New York, I968, p. 94. ² Id.

One may genuinely wonder how Teilhard de Chardin could postulate such a phenomenon. The answer is simply that as a Geologist and Palaeontologist, he studied the past and his studies of the past enabled him to establish knowledge of the future. The "vision of the past" helped him to foresee the "future of man"^I as he writes in a letter of September 8^th I935:

K Le passé m'a révélé la construction de l'Avenir... Précisément pour parler avec quelque autorité de l'Avenir, il m'est essentiel de m'établir avec plus de solidité que jamais comme un spécialiste du Passé. 0²

He believed that it is only by carefully studying the past that we can understand the present and anticipate the future. In this context, therefore, we consider Teilhard de Chardin a Prophet of globalisation. Faced with so much destruction at this beginning of the 3^rd millennium, we can still affirm that the planetary consciousness of Teilhard de Chardin is taking place; it is a process that is certifiable. Here lies the intrinsic value of this French Jesuit priest, as Charles RAVEN says:

It is perhaps Teilhard's greatest service to our time that having accepted the whole cosmic process as one, continuous, complexified and convergent, he can regard it with an unfaltering hope. Anyone who enters into the significance of evolution will find in the record of its evidence of progress and therefore of encouragement, not as an exception, but in its diverse forms and at every level verifiable and conclusive.³

Indeed, Teilhard de Chardin stands as a great scientist of the future and it was through the study of the past that he was able to postulate that the cosmos is in progress and that this phenomenon was irreversible. Today, peoples, cultures and civilizations are gathering in order to build communities having the same political, economic and financial goals. In Europe this is taking place under the European Union, America is a

^I These are titles of two of Teilhard de Chardin's works: The Vision of the Past and The Future of Man.

² Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, L'avenir de l'homme, Paris, I959, p. I3. The past revealed to me the construction of the future...Precisely, in order to speak about the future with some authority, it is essential for me to become, more than ever, a specialist of the past.

³ Charles Raven, Teilhard de Chardin Scientist and Seer, London, I962, p. 75.

federation of States. In Africa, much still needs to be done to build the African Union. Nevertheless, with the phenomenon of globalisation, the world is becoming a village where there is a flow of information, thanks to the computerisation of information and to the Internet. The Internet thus appears to be an effect of the growth of collective consciousness; it is an effect of the Teilhardian noosphere which is still in progress. Before considering the effectiveness of the noospherical progress, let us consider the auto-destruction of our planet in the light of the Teilhardian vision of the future of the universe.

Our world nowadays is faced with the problem of destruction on a planetary scale. Conferences are being organised in order to discuss matters arising from this possible destruction of the earth. The world is being polluted through human activity. The protection of the environment, the question of food scarcity and the question of global warming, are preoccupations at a planetary level. In this chapter we are going to consider the auto-destruction of our planet, auto-destruction in the sense that man is responsible for the destruction of the earth through over-exploitation and over-industrialisation. Because of this auto-destruction of the planet, we are tempted to think that evolution has come to an end and that there is no hope for humanity. Nevertheless, in the Teilhardian vision, there is no need for us to despair, despite all the destruction, despite all the violence, despite all the hatred portrayed in our world today, evolution is continuing and the earth is progressing towards the Omega Point, the centre of all progress, the centre and end of all evolution. Teilhard de Chardin calls for optimism and optimistic attitudes despite the auto-destruction of our planet today. Let us now consider the manner in which the earth, our planet, is being polluted and destroyed. Despite wars, hatred, the auto-destruction of our planet in our postindustrial society, marked by pollution, following the Teilhardian vision, we can still remain optimistic towards the future, and this is the purpose of this chapter which focuses on the damages caused to our planet.

5.1. Pollution and planetary destruction

Pollution is portrayed at several levels of the biosphere. We do experience it in air, water and even in the soil. The deterioration of the ozone layer leads to global warming which endangers life on the planet earth and leads to planetary destruction.

5.1.1. Air pollution

Air Pollution, is the addition of harmful substances to the atmosphere resulting in damage to the environment, human health, and quality of life. One of many forms of pollution, air pollution, occurs inside homes, schools, and offices, in cities, across continents, and even globally. Air pollution makes people sick, it causes breathing problems and promotes cancer and it harms plants, animals, and the ecosystems in which they live. Some air pollutants return to Earth in the form of acid rains, which corrode statues and buildings, damage crops and forests, and make lakes and streams unsuitable for fish and other plant and animal life.

Pollution is changing the Earth's atmosphere so that it lets in more harmful radiation from the Sun. At the same time, our polluted atmosphere is becoming a better insulator, preventing heat from escaping back into space and leading to a rise in global average temperatures. Scientists predict that the temperature increase, referred to as "global warming", will affect world food supply, alter sea levels, make the weather more extreme, and increase the spread of tropical diseases.

5.1.2. Water pollution

If the human body is made up of about two-thirds water, our planet has about seventy per cent of it, which establishes the fact that water constitutes a major portion in both body masses. And that is what is alarming. If seventy per cent of the earth's surface is made up of water, then humankind should have been very wary of anything that would pollute this major portion of the planet. Alas, the human race has done

97 otherwise. Water pollution is now a global problem. Today, water pollution is rampant and the chief source of water pollution is the human race. We are the very ones that need water most and, yet, we have polluted it, even to the brink of extinction. Muriel GRIMALDI and Patrick CHAPELLE describe this sorrowful situation in the following words:

D[La pollution] est universelle et multiforme. Depuis toujours l'humanite s'est debarrassee de la plupart de ses dechets en les confiant au sol et et l'eau. Mais les progres recents en matiere d'intrants agricoles (engrais, pesticides) et de genie chimique ont mis en circulation des millions de tonnes de produits toxiques qui finissent par s'accumuler dans les reserves d'eau. »¹

There are many types of water pollutants but these can be segregated into four classifications: natural, agricultural, municipal and industrial pollutants. Natural water pollutants could include all the natural phenomena that happen from time to time such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes that cause major upheavals in the ocean floor and storms that cause flashfloods. Even global warming could be qualified as a cause of water pollution.

Agricultural pollution consists mainly of poultry and other agricultural animal wastes that are carelessly thrown off to bodies of water near farms. It could also be the fertilizers or pesticides that are used to make better crops, which erode into lakes, rivers or streams. Municipal wastes are those that come from residential areas. This is the liquid waste that households throw into bodies of water. Industrial pollution consists of all the wastes that major industrial firms chuck into the waters. This last classification is the most severe and most rampant among the three - and it is also the one that has

^I Muriel Grimaldi and Patrick Chapelle, Apocalypse, mode d'emploi, Paris, I993, p. 28. [Pollution] is universal and multiform. Ever since, humanity has done away with its dirt by throwing them on the ground and in the waters. But recent advances in agricultural products (manure and pesticides) and of chemical ingenuity have brought about billions of tones of toxic products which end up by being accumulated in waters.

caused the most damage. Industrial waste could include contaminants that are hard to take off from the waters once they spread petroleum from oil spills or nuclear wastes.

The bodies of water in the world are in catastrophic danger with what all the industries in the world today, plus our individual wastes all put together. No wonder mankind now drinks from bottles instead of just scooping water from running streams. The effects of water pollution to humanity are staggering. But we should also consider all the other life forms that suffer: the fishes and other animals such as birds, and plants. It is only left to us to imagine just what happens when humans eat the very fishes that live in polluted waters.

5.1.3. Global warming

Global Warming or Climate Change is the measurable increases in the average temperature of Earth's atmosphere, oceans, and landmasses. Scientists believe Earth is currently facing a period of rapid warming brought on by rising levels of heat-trapping gases, known as greenhouse gases, in the atmosphere. Earth has warmed and cooled many times since its formation about 4.6 billion years ago. Global climate changes were due to many factors, including massive volcanic eruptions, which increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; changes in the intensity of energy emitted by the Sun; and variations in Earth's position relative to the Sun, both in its orbit and in the inclination of its spin axis. Scientists project global warming to continue at a rate that is unprecedented in hundreds of thousands or even millions of years of Earth's history. They predict considerably more warming in the 2Ist century, depending on the level of future greenhouse gas emissions.

In the Teilhardian vision of the world, despite the autodestruction of the planet by the human activity which leads to any kind of pollution, evolution continues its process and matter as well as humanity is evolving towards perfection, towards the Omega Point.^I There is no need for humanity to despair. Even if we are witnessing

nowadays many conflicts in many parts of the earth, in the Middle East, in Africa, Teilhard de Chardin who had witnessed both the First and the Second World Wars, calls for optimism. He was a man of science and most especially a man of faith. He believed that despite wars and hatred, the general movement of civilization was leading them towards a form of conviviality, he called on mankind to build a new earth by spiritualisin g it with love. For Teilhard de Chardin, man has the duty to give to the world a consistency in the movement of constant effort towards unity. As man becomes great, so too humanity becomes united, conscious of its common destiny and master of its strength. Despite all kinds of disorder, failure, crisis and imperfections, humanity is in progress. He has faith in man and calls upon him to fight against dispersion and discordance which only work for the delay of the process of unification of humankind.

Teilhard de Chardin asserts that nature is moving, erratically and haltingly perhaps, but nonetheless moving, towards higher and higher forms of consciousness. This movement is most apparent in the evolution of the human species. It is humanity in particular which has a clear concept of nature and nature's inner workings. Teilhard de Chardin quotes Julian Huxley approvingly: humanity is "nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself"^' The specific insights that come into the foreground of awareness as one reflects upon the ascent of this species are both its uniqueness and its relatedness to the whole of the natural world. For Teilhard de Chardin, the most sublime product of evolution is the human person, the individual person uniquely aware of itself as a person, yet also aware of his interdependence with the whole community.

Calling for more solidarity and love amongst the inhabitants of the earth, Teilhard de Chardin laid emphasis on the spiritual aspect of evolution. Evolution is not only that of consciousness or that of nature; it aims at the spiritualization of the earth with love. This is because, in the process of evolution, matter is always serving the spirit. Neither money, nor riches, should be the motives or the basis of human conviviality,

material goods should not take a place of pride in human relationships. But then, our century is one marked by the endless quest for riches and power, placing money and profit above all values and globalisation thus appears as the spirit serving matter.

5.2. Globalisation: The Spirit serving Matter

Our world today is characterised by the process of globalisation. Globalisation is a phenomenon that expands interconnectedness in the world. It is not just an economic phenomenon because it also affects cultural, political, social, legal and religious life. These aspects of globalisation interact with each other and there are feedback loops between them. Also, experiences of globalisation differ. Our geographical, cultural, political, economic and social location will influence our conception of globalisation either as mainly an opportunity or as mainly a threat. Moreover, the same person may experience both positive and negative aspects of globalisation.

The current globalisation is a geohistorical process of gradual worldwide expansion of capitalism according to the formula of Laurent Carroué^I, is both an ideology: liberalism, a currency: the dollar, an instrument: capitalism, a political system: democracy and one language: English.

This phenomenon results in many consequences leading to the alienation of man, life and the environment. Today, we are faced with an increase in the hunt for power and wealth. This quest for material goods is what seems to be at the basis of human relationships so much that spiritual values are neglected and even abandoned and replaced by wealth. The treasure of contemporary man seems to be in wealth and we remember, where our treasure is, there too is our heart². Globalisation is sustained by the technoscientific rationality which places the value of profit, benefit and money above all other values.

^I L. Carroue, D. Collet and C. Ruiz, La Mondialisation. Genese, acteurs et enjeux, Breal, 2005. ² Matt. 6:2I: Jesus told to his disciples "where your treasure is, there too your heart will be."

We are witnessing nowadays, under the Neoliberal ideology, the dehumanisation of the individual person who is considered only in so far as he can produce as much wealth as possible; so much that euthanasia, abortion, kamikaze operations and other forms of killing seem to become common practices as they are legalised and even encouraged in some parts of the world. Hence, the present situation of our globe is a deplorable one and globalisation appears to be as the rule of matter over the spirit.

5.2.1. Globalisation and Mercantilism

The current globalisation is first and foremost a financial globalisation, with the creation of a global capital market and the explosion of hedge funds. The end of State regulation that had been established just after World War II occurred in three stages: first, deregulation, that is, the disappearance in I97I of parity stable currencies, which began to float at the option of supply and demand, then disintermediation, the opportunity for private borrowers to finance themselves on financial markets without resorting to bank loans; and the opening of markets : borders that used to compartmentalise different careers in finance are abolished, allowing operators to have multiple opportunities. Thanks to satellite, to computers and the Internet, globalisation has resulted in the instantaneous transfer of capital from a bank to another depending on the profit outlook in the short term. The stock markets of the world being interconnected; the finance market is always opened. A virtual economy is born, disconnected from the production system: depending on changes in interest rates of currencies and prospects for profit. Financial investments become more important than productive functions. Investors can choose to liquidate a company and to lay off employees.

longue, celle de la soumission progressive de tout espace physique et
social a la loi du capital, loi d'accumulation sans fin qui est la

finalite ultime du systeme economique invente il y a pres d'un millenaire par les cites marchandes de Mediterranee. »¹

Globalisation is therefore essentially capitalist with a reckless pursuit of profit resulting in immediate loss of those who cannot afford to deal with this phenomenon both economically and politically, and enriching those who can afford this economic policy.

5.2.2. Globalisation and Neoliberalism

Liberalism is an ideology, which is not necessarily outdated, and simply a system of representation with shared history and values. Globalisation is the economic side of capitalism while neoliberalism is its ideological side. It is this ideology that controls the relations among States today, which has at its basis the techno-scientific rationality that instrumentalizes all.

The turning point occurred in the I980s. In I979, the arrival to power of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in Britain inaugurated the advent of liberal doctrines. The same year, Senegal launched the first "structural adjustment plan": the debt crisis has just begun for developing countries, forced to adopt "development strategies conducive to market", according to financial institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF. This unification of economic models reaches not only the developing world but also the East.

In ten years the world has changed decisively. The end of the Cold War created the illusion that an international community was born, a community which will finally

Jacques Adda, La mondialisation de l'économie, 1. Genése, Paris, 200I, p. 4. Globalisation thus appears to be rooted in a longer trend, that of the progressive submission of any physical and social space to the law of capital accumulation, an endless accumulation which is the ultimate finality of the economic system invented nearly a millennium ago by the cities of the Mediterranean.

live in peace. Capitalism seems to have triumphed, so that Francis Fukuyama announced "the end of history"^I.

In neo-liberalism, there is "neo". It is important to distinguish yesterday liberalism, liberalism of the early I9th century, mainly political from today liberalism, almost exclusively economic liberalism, rejuvenated by globalisation and the apparent disappearance of economic alternatives and policies.

Political liberalism has much to do with what interests us, nothing that could displease us in any case: it opposes itself to authoritarianism in general, and historically to monarchical powers in particular, it challenges the concentration of power among few hands and defends freedom of conscience, religious freedom or political freedom.

Economic liberalism, opposes itself to "Statism", and raises the existence of economic laws under which a natural balance is established between production, distribution and consumption. As such, it is historically opposed to socialism. Any government intervention in the economy should be prohibited. It is a minimal conception of politics, which aims at defending freedom of employment, private initiative, and therefore competition, free trade. We therefore see the link between first liberalism and economic liberalism: there is a mistrust vis-a-vis the State, even when the political system is respectful of freedoms. It depends on a rather narrow view of the State and freedom that both necessarily exclude themselves. We therefore understand why in Africa in general and in Cameroon in particular, there is an excessive privatisation of State companies and an increase of private enterprises.

^I The End of History and the Last Man is a I992 book by Francis Fukuyama, expanding on his I989 essay "The End of History?" published in the international affairs journal The National Interest. In the book, Fukuyama argues that the advent of Western liberal democracy may signal the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the final form of human government.

Neo-liberalism is the second update of this conception, which accommodates sometimes some planning of the economy by the State, but still upholds the principle of free enterprise and competition, principles which are widely recognized today by the law, but it seeks to reduce further limitations of freedom. The role of politics, even if it is partly acknowledged, is still very limited and is subordinated to that of economy. In our view, it is not among those opposed to neoliberalism, to challenge the right to private initiative, but to remind its limits, and the danger when the State makes of it a political agenda. It is simply the time for us to raise the awareness of our democracies to their ideal of freedom, equality, and fraternity and to require that these ideals do not remain in the sphere of theory and to assure that the society does not regress.

Neo-liberalism appears as a utopia underway to unlimited exploitation by neoliberal measures tried or proposed in the I980s and 90s, and supported by the IMF and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). With computers, capitalism has no boundaries. In fact, René Passet and Jean Liberman declare:

K L'informatisation d'une économie capitaliste rentière a fait tomber les frontieres nationales, et offre subitement un champ illimité au déchainement de la spéculation internationale. La grande bénéficiaire en a donc été la sphere des marchés financiers s'appropriant progressivement le pouvoir détenu jusqu'alors par l'industrie et l'Etat-nation. Ceci grace au poids majeur des institutions financiere, des firmes transnationales et surtout a la puissance politique des institutions mondiales a leur servie : FMI, Banque mondiale ou OMC dictant leur loi aux Etats (avec d'ailleurs leur complicité). »¹

^I René Passet et Jean Liberman, Mondialisation financiere et terrorisme, La donne a-t-elle changé de puis le 11 septembre ? Paris, 2002, pp.32-33. The computerisation of a capitalist economy has broken national borders down, and suddenly offers a field of unlimited international speculation. The great beneficiary of this computerisation of economy was the sphere of financial markets gradually appropriating powers hitherto held by industry and the nation-state. This was thanks to major financial institutions, corporations and especially the political power of global institutions at their service: IMF, World Bank and WTO dictating their laws to States (with their complicity).

The misery is great at work today; many companies develop effective techniques to oblige workers to accept unacceptable working conditions. In our country, for example, following one's documents in a ministry or another State institution requires much courage and perseverance because the procedure is very slow and its acceleration often requires payment. We must see behind it the dictatorship of markets, which imposes to companies its own standards of profitability and its quest for profit in the short term.

Jacques ADDA thinks this whole business operating without limits is that of mercantilism:

gLe mercantilisme, généralement réduit dans les manuels d'économie a une doctrine protectionniste assimilant la richesse a l'accumulation des métaux précieux, fut avant tout un vaste mouvement de libéralisation du commerce intérieur imposé par les Etats-nations issus du régime féodal, qui mettait fin au systeme de protection économique et sociale des villes. L'Etat répondait ainsi au vmu le plus cher des commerçants internationaux, qui pouvaient des lors déployer leurs activités sur l'ensemble du marché intérieur. De cette alliance entre la classe des marchands et les Etats, devait na'tre le systeme concurrentiel caractéristique de l'économie de marché. 01

Hence, Neoliberalism fosters a terrible jump back as far as social values already acquired are concerned. This phenomenon is akin to a revolution in that it will deprive the people of a number of their properties, their progress, with a need to adapt to a globalized market, necessarily ruthless. Slowly but surely, governments are deprived of

^IJacques Adda, La mondialisation de l'économie, 1. Genése, Paris, 200I, p.II. Mercantilism, generally reduced in economy textbooks to a protectionist equating wealth accumulation of precious metals, was primarily a wide liberalization of trade imposed by Nation-States from the feudal regime, which ended the system of economic and social protection of cities. The State thus responded to the utmost wish of international traders, who could then expand their operations across the market. This alliance between the class of merchants and States was to develop the system characteristic of the competitive market

106 their prerogatives and their conduct is dictated by the interpreters of the world market: if there is no reversal of the regime, it is because the conservative revolution takes a much more subtle form to seize power: it proceeds by small touches and operates by substitution; it leads governments to abandon their fate in the hands of international bodies, seemingly apolitical and uncontrollable.

Within the country, the best evidence of the effectiveness of this revolution is the constant guilt growing among civil servants, who fear for the most part to defend their status, as earned by a guilty conscience, feeling that they are the "privileged". This is the victory of neoliberalism: to increase the defence of acquired social values for a heinous corporatism, where the only concern is that of acceptable working conditions. It is therefore necessary to reverse the trend to refuse division and reaffirm that defending acquired social values is to defend the common good, and therefore some idea of the universal. It would therefore be useful to work for a counter-revolution. Of course, to defend a certain level of social protection is perhaps a form of conservatism, but only in appearance, because it aims at extending the gains to society, and more broadly to all societies, regardless of what they are, European, American or Asian.

5.2.3. Globalisation and Deshumanisation

K Alors que notre civilisation démocratique, a voulu promouvoir l'homme comme Sujet, le régne de l' K argent fou », l'appat du gain immédiat et planétaire comme finalité premiere de toute activité humaine, ne sont-ils pas en passe de réifier l'individu a travers la marchandisation dévorante de l'ensemble de la création ?Il s'agit désormais en fait non seulement d'argent, de drogue, d'armes, (mais aussi) d'êtres humains (leurs organes), d'muvres d'art, etc : K Tout ce qui s'achéte et qui se vend va au plus offrant et traverse les frontieres sans grand souci des contrôles. » Mais l'efficacité de la lutte contre cette régression généralisée n'oblige-t-elle pas a mettre au jour les conditions de l'émergence de ce totalitarisme financier ? » 1

This is the question that René Passet and Jean Liberman invite us to answer. By "financial totalitarianism" we understand "financial globalisation", "neoliberal globalisation" and "neoliberalism". Indeed, the rationality behind the phenomenon of globalisation seems to relegate the human person in the background. Man is no longer the first value; he is given any importance only when he can generate profits and perhaps because his organs are very expensive on the international market; if not, he seems to have no value, no dignity at all and can be used as any other instrument to bring in money.

The planet and mankind are facing challenges and these challenges are related to their very survival. It is the social question and the growing income gap between rich and poor on all continents and countries, generating situations of tension and violence: fundamentalism, nationalism, racism and ethnic wars. There are growing inequalities between Southern countries and Western countries in all fields.

5.2.3.1. Globalisation and Human Rights

At first glance, the neoliberal globalisation appears to have had devastating effects on human rights. The new forms of imperial sovereignty take their distance as compared to Nation-States in relation to the United Nations based on the declaration of I948. Such a description would be largely incomplete because globalisation, expression of a mutation of large-scale capitalism, also brings about other rights since the redefinition and extension of private property; but also, conversely, new subjects expressing new needs and rights both public and private. The logic of universal human rights is redefined. The content of fundamental rights such as freedom, equality, and democracy

Subject, are the reign of "mad money", the lure of immediate and global success as the first purpose of any human activity, not going to reify the individual person through the devouring commercialization of all creation? It is now not only money, drugs, weapons, but also human beings (their organs), works of art, etc.: "All that is bought and sold goes to the highest bidder and crosses borders with little concern for controls. But does the effectiveness of the fight against this general regression not oblige us to uncover the conditions for the emergence of this financial totalitarianism?I

has led to new frontlines and probably to the political construction of these rights. This construction aims at exploring some of the transformations of these rights and the expression of new subjects of law inaugurates a crisis of the functionality of human rights to a globalisation which is servant of the market and of capitalism.

Globalisation understood as an interdependence of peaceful relations between nations, a growing interpenetration of their economies, a homogenisation of values and modernisation, a tendency to establish democratic regimes, appeared powerfully to establish human rights between I948 and I989. The proclamation of the Universal Charter of Human Rights of I948 constituted the foundation of the constitution of the United Nations.

5.2.3.2. Human rights Crisis

Human rights fall into a crisis which would be linked to a historic withdrawal of the Nation-State in Europe. Human rights are based on a premise: the absolute concept of the dignity of the human person. Unfortunately, because of insufficient consideration of "human sciences", and specifically Ethnology / Anthropology - we are facing disorder and even more serious, we are faced with a real impasse: the vast majority of men believe that what is most important in the world, is not man, or "God" or "nature", but money and wealth making. What appears to be universalized today is a culture that does not respect the individual person, the Absolute and nature. We think that universality should be one of responsible freedom, a freedom which considers any individual person on the basis of his dignity as a human person. Universality must not aim at destroying cultural and individual identity but at placing values that are positive in any culture, any civilization, and any people above particularities.

One thing we are certain about is that what is good is good and what is evil is evil, there are some values that should transcend time and space and all cultures because they are intrinsically good. Human value is invaluable and man must be considered as a value above all other values no matter the culture, the space or the time. As such, human rights, in so far as they are based on the dignity of the human person, should be respected everywhere at every moment.

This is the foundation of universal human rights. It is from this foundation that was born the respect for difference, the unconditionality of the other person, and this is the only true foundation of communal life for humanity as a whole. Man is then defined not only as a zon politikon, a political animal, as gifted with language, following Aristotle, as capable of salvation in the monotheistic religious tradition, but also as a living being able to establish and preserve a diversity of values and to communicate them. It is the unconditional nature of values which is the criterion of assessment and validation to the level of "human" values.

The narrow dependence of the definition of the "human nature" vis-a-vis the current state of science, especially the science of living is always in our mind when discussions arise about attributing the statute of human being to the embryo, not to talk about debates about human identity when human organ transplants and cloning techniques leave the field of science fiction.

In this context human rights are already in a phase of auto-limitation since man himself, in denying to consider the other person as a value, denies acknowledging that he himself is a value, that he has some dignity as a human person. Because human rights are the foundations of the dignity of the human person, it is the occasion here for us to reaffirm the value of the human person in order to raise the awareness of the international community on the need to respect human rights which value the dignity of each individual human being.

5.2.4. The value of the human person

With the emergence of biotechnology, underpinned by techno-scientific rationality, we are witnessing today a real crisis of values. The techno-scientific rationality, because it absolutises money or profit as a value, represents a real devaluation of humanity. If, as Gilbert Hottois noted, the credo of technosciences is that "everything possible must be tried"¹, then man is also reduced to a mere subject of study and experimentation.

From the foregoing, the question arises to know whether we should set the absolute value of the human person on his ability to generate a profit on behalf of the consolidation of a global mercantile rationality and techno-scientific progress, or set it solely on the indivisibility of his being, his uniqueness, and his intrinsic dignity. So we must first reflect on the current crisis of values and its impact on the devaluation of humanity.

5.2.4.1. The current crisis of values

The current crisis of values seems to be linked to the emergence of an economic logic which develops its own morality: the search for maximum profit and the pursuit of personal interests. The desire to succeed by all means overrides a humanistic desire to lead a life that is morally acceptable. Indeed, the main characteristic of technical rationality is not to question ends, but only means, the end being already determined by the techno-scientific enterprise, which aims at optimizing efficiency and results. This leads to "attacks against the humanity of man" in the form of genetic manipulations, experimentations on the human person, use of human organs for drug design, modern day slavery to the benefit of industrial gains, just to mention that.

Today as yesterday, whenever a problem occurs between nations, the desire for power seems to be more important than the moral law. In addition, the pressure of the

economy on the society introduces the reign of competition among individual persons, a competition that necessarily leads to the normalization of differences between rich and poor. To the benefit of the valorisation of wealth, pleasure takes priority over effort, emotion over reason, the virtual and the artificial over the natural, the short-term over the long term, the ego over the collective, uncertainties, and the relativity of morals over certitudes.

In contemporary society, the value of a man now seems to reside on his assets and not on his being. The ideal man is the man full of money, able to produce and amass wealth, even at the expense of others. The excessive materialism is in full swing and moral values are declared obsolete. The downfall of moral values is evident at the global level with the increase of conflicts, the emergence of deviances of any kind: homosexuality, bestiality, paedophilia, incest, facilitated by the establishment of a genuine pleasure industry. At the individual level, there is an identity crisis especially in younger populations, with the emergence of the schizophrenic behaviours, cultural alienation, the split of personality and the inferiority complex in poor countries, victims of the powerful Western media.

For example, there are often people who change the tone of their voices to imitate the white man in his manner of speaking. Also, the inferiority complex is often expressed when a young negro is facing a white man, considering the latter as superior to him by the mere fact that he is white. In addition, this complex is often peculiar to those who believe that travelling to Europe gives them more dignity and then feel superior to others who have never crossed the threshold of their villages. It is this state of affairs that Ebenezer Njoh - Mouelle shows when he states inter alia:

K Si a Yaoundé ou a Douala le commercant se sent obligé, pour vendre ses ceufs camerounais ou ses poulets camerounais, d'y coller des étiquettes indiquant : K ceufs de France », K poulets de Normandie », c'est précisément parce que son compatriote de retour de France lui a inoculé la honte voire mieux le dé!o[t de ce qui est local au profit des K merveilles » d'Europe. 0I

Yet it is urgent to reflect on human nature, a nature grappling with the technoscientific development. Man, as an actor in history, seems to have lost his absolute value and to have replaced it with money or profit, an attitude that often leads him to become not an author of scientific progress, but a victim of the latter; not an end in itself but a means. If man is an absolute value, then what is the foundation of this value?

5.2.4.2. The foundation of human value

The absolute value of the human person is based on his uncompromising nature, his intrinsic dignity which makes him a human being. The concept of moral person within the meaning of the term seems to be unable to make sense unless it is taken in a universal perspective that affirms the substantial reality of any subject and that believes that every man whosoever, has an intrinsic value beyond his physical characteristics, ethnic, social status and everything related to it.

Immanuel Kant in his formulation of the categorical imperative poses man as a moral being by essence because he has a legislative reason through which he is faced with his duties before an intangible moral law. The notion of person is even present in one of the formulas summarizing this moral imperative that Kant describes as

^I Ebenezer Njoh Mouelle, De la médiocrité a l'excellence, Yaounde, I998, p. 43. If in Yaounde and Douala the trader feels compelled to sell his Cameroonian eggs or Cameroonian chicken, to stick labels stating: "eggs from France", "chickens from Normandy," it is precisely because his compatriot on his return from France has inoculated in him the shame and even the disgust of what is locally made to the benefit of "wonders" from Europe.

categorical as opposed to the technical imperative that is a simple calculation of means. Kant says: « Agis de telle sorte que tu traites l'humanité aussi Bien dans ta personne que dans la personne d'autrui toujours en même temps comme fin, jamais simplement comme moyen. »¹

This Kantian formulation could serve as a starting point for any reflection on man's relationship to science and technology, man and globalisation and especially that of man's place in the biomedical field. The person in the Kantian perspective is presented as being embodied with humanity in its moral dimension. In this sense, recognizing the person as an absolute value is to consider him as an object of respect regardless of the status of that person, even when he is limited in the exercise of his freedom.

For the Personalism of Emmanuel Mounier, the person is the source of all values, a person who is defined not only by his intrinsic qualities, but also by his social dimension and in relation to the human community. She is neither an atomized individual nor an individual crushed by society. If the person is defined within the scope of the reciprocity of consciences, the society does not surpass the person; on the contrary, it must organize itself in order to promote her dignity. Promoting the person is promoting the humanizing values and discouraging all instrumentalist inclinations leading to the devaluation of humanity. Yet, the notion of a person cannot be reduced to reason, conscience and freedom. Otherwise, what would be the status of the embryo that is not yet aware of its existence and that cannot even lead it through reason or conscience?

Thus, we think that the notion of a person as an absolute value transcends the merely moral framework to include the existential. The embryo is existentially a person in becoming even if he is not yet a moral subject. The absolute value of the human

^I Immanuel Kant, Les Fondements de la métaphysique des mceurs (I785), Paris, I988, p. I58. "Act in such a way that you treat humanity in both your person as in any other person always at the same time as an end and never simply as means."

person is linked to the indivisibility of the being of the person, its uniqueness and its inherent dignity. To the extent that life begins with conception, then the embryo deserves the respect that is linked to its nature. It is a human being who only needs time to develop and actualize his full potentialities. The absolute value of the person is her humanity, that which makes him a human being beyond his social, moral or legal status.

In this vein, even mad people, the disabled, babies, children, the elderly and even foetuses are entitled to respect because of the humanity that is in them: they are human beings. We believe it is always necessary to qualify as a human person, someone who does not have or who no longer has the use of all his faculties that make him a whole person because of a disability due to illness, deformity or injury. Moreover, we can ask ourselves this question: did the one who lost the use of his faculties actually lost these faculties? This plunges us into the metaphysical dimension of the individual, that is, the ontological foundation of his faculties.

So, if we consider that a human being is a person, we mean that we do not reduce him to a body, that we do not limit his being to its materiality. This means that we assume in every human being a spiritual principle inspiring respect. The absolute value of the person ultimately is linked to her nature as a creature of God. The Bible teaches that God created man in his image.^I

It is the view of man image of God that gives full scope to the absolute value of man. Recognizing their membership of a single creator, men are called to respect the human, better, the divine in every individual person. We will not go on the debate about the existence or non-existence of God. We affirm that He exists and that everything comes from Him. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights for example is rooted in this vision of things, recognizing that respect for human dignity is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world, while recognizing that people's lives must be respected and preserved because they are sacred.

Yet, despite the commitments made more than fifty years ago, there are men, women and children who continue to be displaced, abused, persecuted or executed and the equality of men and women and physical integrity of children are still not fully respected.

Moreover, the human person, considered as an end in itself, with perfectibility and innate irreducibility, is not an instrumentalisable reality. The international community should mobilize itself a little more to promote respect for human rights within communities. Everyone, as individual as well as citizen, whatever his beliefs, should defend the humanizing values through any action in favour of the respect for human rights.

A genuine recognition of human rights on a global scale involves both respect for differences and the definition of common boundaries not to cross and sanctions for transgressions. These limits are imposed on us by the indivisibility of the being of the human person, an irreducibility that gives him the status of absolute value. In a world beset by genetic manipulations and by the instrumentalization of man, it is now more urgent than ever to affirm the value of the human person and to erect it above the economic, social, legal and religious values. It is the task that Pius ONDOUA assigns to philosophy and to the philosopher:

« Etre philosophe aujourd'hui, c'est prendre en charge l'etre : a la fois la nature et la subjectivite humaine ; c'est prendre en charge le reel et l'histoire dont il faut resituer le processus du point de vue de la valeur absolue du sujet et de sa transcendance, pour battre en breche le triomphalisme scientiste/positiviste ; c'est, en un mot, la recherche d'une sagesse du present a partir de laquelle le sujet humain, de nouveau percu comme transcendance, retrouve sa valeur absolue. 1

^I Pius Ondoua Olinga, « Raison plurielle et humanisme de l^?avenir p, in Annales de la Faculte des Arts, lettres et sciences humaines, vol.1. NO.6, Nouvelle Serie, Yaounde, 2007, p. 29. Being a philosopher today, is to be concerned with being: both the nature and the human subjectivity; it is to be concerned with reality and history whose process must be resituated in terms of the absolute value of the subject and of his transcendence, in order to challenge the scientist/ positivist triumphalism; in a word, it is the search for a wisdom of the present from which the human subject, once more considered as transcendence, recovers his absolute value.

Rather than rejecting the phenomenon of globalisation totally, we think that a globalisation that takes account of the dignity of the human person and that works for considerably reducing the gap between the strongest and the weakest, the richest and the poorest, the North and the South, the industrialized world and the underdeveloped world is possible. However, it is necessary that we reconsider the scale of values, considering the fact that the reckless pursuit of profit has led to the instrumentalization of man, actor of globalisation. Rather than fighting against globalisation per se, we are fighting against the Westernisation of the world, the homogenization of cultures and the domination, as in a post-industrial jungle of the stronger over the weaker, a real tragedy that expresses the law of the strongest that exists in the animals jungle between the wolf and the lamb. Another form of conviviality should be envisaged, a conviviality that respects differences and diversities and that affirms complementarity, unity in diversity.

Globalisation will then be a true exchange, a Rendez-vous of the giving and the receiving^' where each people, refusing to be self-sufficient opens itself to others, providing its positive values to others and at the same time receiving the positive values inherent in other peoples. We should therefore avoid dissolution in a totalizing universal, destructive of specificities, cultural individual and collective identities. This, in all optimism, remains possible if man, measure of all things² becomes the centre of everything, and therefore of globalisation.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, globalisation is thus, paradoxically leading the globe astray as far as human values are concerned, as if it had constituted a historic phase in the history of mankind. That is why it is necessary to consider whether another form of conviviality is not possible. Are we really at the end of history with the triumph of the Neoliberal ideology as claimed by Francis Fukuyama? For Teilhard de

117 Chardin, instead of proclaiming the end of history, we should, in all optimism consider that globalisation will have sense if only it becomes primarily a spiritual process where matter is serving the spirit.

5.3. Teilhardian Evolution: matter serving the spirit

The German word Weltanschauung is a term dear to Father Teilhard de Chardin which he uses very frequently.^I It is usually used to refer to an idea of the world, a conception of the world or a world view. This admirable word was welcomed in the lexicon of Teilhard de Chardin. His conception of the world that he explained in all his work with the scientific rigour and celebrated with the enthusiasm of a believer extends, through time and space, to the vastness of the cosmos. In his thought, ' globalisation', reduced in the current use of the word to global perspectives, would have meaning only if it had been seen in the energetic and spiritual dynamism which carries the infinite universe along in its momentum and its becoming .

In a letter written from the Cape in the last years of his life to Father Janssens, Superior General of the Jesuit Society, Father Teilhard de Chardin, disappointed in his hopes to see his ideas accepted by the ecclesiastical authorities, expresses in a few lines his conception of " globalisation" without using the word, which was not yet current:

K ... depuis mon enfance, ma vie spirituelle n'a pas cesse d'être completement dominee par une sorte de "sentiment" profond de la reality organique du Monde ; sentiment originairement asset vague dans mon esprit et dans mon coeur -- mais graduellement devenu, avec les annees, sens précis et envahissant d'une convergence generale sur soi de l'Univers ; cette convergence coincidant et culminant a son sommet, avec Celui in quo omnia constant, que le Ciel m'a appris a aimer »².

^I This word is in fact fundamental in order to designate the original conception of the world proposed by Teilhard de Chardin. In February I948, he entitles a brief essay: "Three things that I see or a Weltanshauung in three points", in Les Directions de l'Avenir, pp. I6I-I75.

² Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Lettres intimes de Teilhard de Chardin [...], Introduction and notes of Henri de Lubac, Aubier-Montaigne, I974, a letter of Octobre I2th I95I. ... since my childhood, my spiritual life has not ceased to be completely dominated by a sort of profound "feeling" of the organic reality of the World; a feeling originally fairly vague in my mind and in my heart - but gradually it has now become, with years, precise and pervasive sense of a general convergence on itself of the Universe; this

Internationalization of trade, convergence of savings, financial flows between continents, opening of markets, banking and stock of market vagaries, multiplication of the news media or communication, new technologies, computers, the Internet, multinational or transnational companies, the expansion of the Neoliberal democracy and the market economy, global conflicts, cultural miscegenation: all these words, among others, which constitute the foundations of the semantic around the concept of globalisation are not in the Teilhardian lexicon.^I Nevertheless, they implicitly somehow, mutatis mutandi, constitute Teilhard de Chardin's conception of globalisation. For a better life, men are called upon to be united. Humanity continues to be united and even in Teilhard de Chardin's days, there was already a great step towards unity with the Declaration of human rights in I948.

5.3.1. A spiritual phenomenon

"Globalisation", according to Teilhard de Chardin, would be the effect of an irresistible attraction to the Omega Point, point of Universal convergence. The word "totalisation" manifests this energy. He writes in this regard:

K Representons-nous [...] un homme devenu conscient de ses relations personnelles avec un Personnel supreme, auquel il est conduit a s'agreger par le jeu entier des activites cosmiques. En un tel sujet, et a partir de lui, il est inevitable qu'un processus d'unification se trouve amorce, marque de proche en proche par les +tapes suivantes : totalisation de chaque operation par rapport a l'individu ; totalisation de l'individu par rapport a lui-meme ; totalisation enfin des individus dans le collectif humain. - Tout cet K impossible » se realisant naturellement sous l'influence de l'amour. »=

convergence coinciding and culminating at its summit, with Him in quo omnia constant, that Heaven taught me to love.

^I None of these words appears in Claude Cuénot's Le nouveau lexique Teilhard de Chardin, Paris, Seuil, I968.

² Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, L'Energie humaine (6 aoat I937), Oeuvres VI, pp. I82-I83. Let us represent ourselves [...] a man who has become aware of his personal relationships with the Supreme Personal, to which he is lead to merge through the entire cosmic activities. With such a subject and from him, it is inevitable that a process of unification begins, marked step by step through the following stages: totalisation of each operation related to the individual; totalisation of the individual with himself; and finally, totalisation of individuals in the human togetherness. - All this "unbelievable" being realised naturally under the influence of love.

5.3.2. Creation as a continuous process

According to Teilhard de Chardin, because the creation of the universe takes its source in the "pure Multiple" or the "creatable nothingness", it is a continuous phenomenon:

« Non, la Création n'a jamais cessé. Mais son acte est un grand geste continu, espacé sur la Totalité des Temps. Elle dure encore ; et, incessamment, bien qu'imperceptiblement, le Monde émerge un peu plus au-dessus du Néant »¹.

This creation which is always in becoming is the very expression of Evolution. It is neither a blind nor an automatic mechanism. It implies and demands the active participation of the actors who are engaged in it. Men are called to build the earth and Teilhard de Chardin insists on the fact that man is co-creator of the world both through his great achievement and in the least important of his works:

g Nous nous imaginions peut-titre que la Création est depuis longtemps finie. Erreur, elle se poursuit de plus belle, et dans les zones les plus élevées du monde... Et c'est a l'achever que nous servons, meme par le travail le plus humble de nos mains. »²

Hence, globalisation as these intuitions suggest would be a collective project participating in the advance of the universe. It is a risky project, an adventure full of chaos and disorder. Teilhard de Chardin, who does not abide to the conception of those who are totally against globalisation, remains optimistic. In this vein, he wonders:

^I Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Ecrits du temps de guerre, Oeuvres XII, I9I7, p. I49. No, Creation has never ceased. But its act is a great continuous gesture, spaced on the Totality of Time. It is ongoing, and, everlastingly, although imperceptibly, the World emerges a little more above Nothingness.

² Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Oeuvres IV, I926-I927, p.50. We may imagine that Creation has been over ever since. This is a mistake, Creation continues, unabated, and in the highest areas of the world...We are called to bring it to its fulfilment even through the most humble work of our hands.

~Mal de desordre et d'insucces :...], Mal de decomposition :...]. Mal de solitude et d'angoisse :...] Douleurs et fautes, larmes et sang, 1...] Voila donc, en fin de compte, ce qui dans un premier temps d'observation et de reflexion, nous revele le spectacle du Monde en mouvement. Mais est-ce vraiment tout, -- et n'y a-t-il pas autre chose a voir 1 »¹

Teilhardian optimism needs to be situated in a scientific context in order to be understood as a counter trend to the pessimistic secular eschatology of our days. Teilhard de Chardin was aware not just of the need to counter pessimism, but also of the need for engagement, rather than withdrawal, and solidarity, rather than isolation. He seemed to be more concerned that humanity would run out of psychic energy before material resources were exhausted. While he may have been naïve about the environmental dangers, the difficulties that are faced by environmentalists today concern the lack of will to change, an apathy in spite of knowing what the dangers might be. In this sense, Teilhard de Chardin seems to be right in his estimation that psychic energy is a prerequisite to action and knowledge. We need to learn to be co-creative with the earth in engaging with it, rather than withdrawing from it by turning away from its demands. The question of whether the evolution of the cosmos has a goal remains the ultimate question to be tackled. We are convinced of the fact that Teilhard's vision can help to sustain hope even in the midst of more pessimistic accounts about the future of the universe and planet earth.

^I Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, appendix to Le Ph+nomène humain of Octobre 28th I948. Sorrowful situation of disorder and lack [...],sorrowful situation of decomposition[...], sorrowful situation of loneliness and anguish [...], pains and mistakes, tears and blood, [...], that is, ultimately, what at first observation and reflection, the spectacle of the World in movement reveals to us. But then, is this really all about our world, is there nothing else to envisage?

According to Teilhard de Chardin, Consciousness and Matter are aspects of the same reality, and are called the "Within" and the "Without" respectively. Evolution is the steady increase in the "Within" or degree of consciousness and complexity, through a number of successive stages: the various grades of inanimate matter; life or the "Biosphere"; man or thought or mind, the "Noosphere". Teilhard de Chardin thus follows the evolutionist understanding of an evolutionary progression from inanimate matter through primitive life and invertebrates to fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and finally man; always an increase in consciousness. With man a threshold is crossed: self-conscious thought, or mind, appears. But even humans do not represent the endpoint of evolution, for this process will continue until all humans are united in the "Omega Point"^I. Teilhardian cosmology thus revolves around the idea of an evolutionary progression towards greater and greater consciousness, culminating first in the appearance of self-conscious mind in humankind, and then in the Omega point of divinization of humanity. Inviting us not to despair and to believe in the progress of humanity, Teilhard de Chardin asserts:

If progress is a myth, that is to say, if faced by the work involved we can say `What's the good of it all?' our efforts will flag. With that the whole of evolution will come to a halt -- because we are evolution. (...) There is no such a thing as the `energy of despair' in spite of what is sometimes said. What those words really mean is a paroxysm of hope against hope. All conscious energy is, like love (and because it is love), founded on hope.²

² Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of man, New York, I959, p. 23I, footnote included.

6.1. The process of Evolution

Evolution, Teilhard de Chardin has assured us, is not complete; it is rebounding in the same process of 'curving back upon itself'; but this time as an Evolution conscious of itself, thus giving birth to a new stage of Noo genesis, which did not stop after the creation of the Noosphere. Quite the contrary, by the very overpopulation of the Earth, Noogenesis is progressing rapidly towards the future, right before our very eyes.

Then how are we to recognize this progression, this new stage of Noo genesis? Is there any hope for a real planetary consciousness in the third millennium? Dare we hope for an age in which Matter will be put to the service of the Mind rather than the exact opposite which occurs today? If so, how does this change take place?

According to Teilhard de Chardin, this rebound of Evolution is taking place by subtle mutations, from generation to generation along a continuum, following the genetic phylum begun in the shadows of the enormous Past of Mankind. It is visible to alert eyes in the small nuances that one observes in each difference noticeable in the space of a few generations. Let us take the phenomenon of Prolepsis, or the difference in height between a given generation and its descendents. Let us say, for example, that F2 is taller than FI. This phenomenon has already been observed by science for several decades and is becoming more frequent. Noticed before only in the peoples of northern Europe, this phenomenon is evident today in peoples of the entire world, without distinction of race or color.

Parallel to this mutation, there is an increasing difference in the Intellectual Quotient of younger generations; one can easily observe a noticeable difference in favor of the F2 generation. That proves, recalling the Law of Complexity-Consciousness that rules Evolution and keeping in mind the development of the structures of the brain, that this is a question of a movement of Cerebralization. This is a cerebral complexification, as physical as it is psychic: physical, given the specialization of the neurons with the augmentation of nerve fibers necessary in order to occupy more space

in a physical body of greater height and a more complex brain; and psychic, in relation to the behavior of Man, who, following the principle law, is becoming more conscious of himself and seeking more and more Individuation through an inner convergence in harmony with the evolutionary directive.

In The Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard de Chardin talks about pre-life, life, and the Omega Point. According to him the pre-life is what we call matter. In calling it 'pre-life', he wants to imply that there is already a direction, a tendency, an obscure sort of will in matter.

He distinguishes three things in matter: plurality, by virtue of which the substratum of the tangible Universe slopes down towards a limitless base, disintegrating as it goes. Secondly Unity, which pushes the elements towards each other so as to comprehend them together in one great whole, the Universe and finally Energy, or capacity for interaction. The immediate consequence of this is that the world forms a system by its plurality, a Totum by its energy.

What is new here is that we can see matter under the twin categories of duration and of evolution, instead of fixity and geometry. The whole universe in fact, is found to be engaged in an immense evolution. Teilhard de Chardin recalls at this point that two principal laws rule matter: that of the conservation of energy and that of the degradation of energy. The more the quantum of energy in the world functions, the more it gets used up. This is the fundamental phenomenon of the world which necessarily leads to the "Phenomenon of Man".

Nevertheless, when examining man's behaviour today, we have to scrutinize his deeper motivations and not get lost in needlessly detailed considerations of his physical structure, however perfected, which seems to crown Evolution. Rather, in order that this human phenomenon may have a sense, we have to suppose another dynamic structure in Man: his Mind or Soul; which would seem to have no discernable "dwelling place" in all these specialized cerebral ramifications; but which is going to orient his

124 psychic behaviour from this time forward towards greater spiritual development in order to prepare for the coming age. Teilhard de Chardin firmly believed that

(...) the march of Humanity, as a prolongation of that of all other animate forms, develops indubitably in the direction of a conquest of Matter put to the service of the Mind. ...Thought might artificially perfect the thinking instrument itself; life might rebound forward under the collective effect of its Reflection.^'

6.1.1. The beginning of Evolution

Evolution begins at the Alpha Point.² This is the "terminus a quo" of evolution and a rather obscure point in the Teilhardian system. It is not what we usually understand by "creatio ex nihilo". According to Teilhard de Chardin, the starting point of evolution is infinite multiplicity, but disorganized: "Infinite Disorder". It was like having stones but not the building or like having seeds but not the plant. Creation, for him, is a creative union, meaning that it is that which brings about unification out of multiplicity; thus creation is not and cannot be instantaneous. It is still going on.

Evolution does not proceed haphazardly; it is ortho genetic; it has a direction, a goal, an axis of development. The axis passes through the amphibians, reptiles, mammals, the primates and leads straight to man.³ We can almost pinpoint the axis in the gradual, observable complexification of the nervous system, especially of the brain.

We can follow it almost step by step. If we go back in time, we can follow the axis of evolution as it crosses various thresholds, leading from lithosphere to the biosphere, the vitalization of matter; and from the biosphere to the noosphere, the thinking layer which now covers the world.

^I Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, New York, I959, pp. 248-25I.

It would seem that there is still a long march ahead for Humanity in the direction of a conquest of Matter put to the service of the Mind as this new millennium begins.

In despair of finding "peace on Earth", much less thinking of peace at home; in order to escape conflicts and distance himself from the negative forces of disintegration, repulsion, materialisation, mechanisation, totalitarianism, and false ideologies which destroy reflection; the thinking man of today interiorizes by turning inward upon himself in the quest of greater Individuation. He seems prone to "break away as far as possible from the crowd of others ...to be more alone so as to increase his being".^I By the excesses of his individualization and his struggle for the "good life", he all too often succumbs to the doctrines of materialism, survival of the fittest and racism, or he dreams of getting away from others and the Earth by seeking other planets or other dimensions of existence.

6.1.2. The end of Evolution

If the cosmic process has a meaning, a direction, a goal, it must have a definite terminus, a terminus ad quem towards which it is advancing. It must have a nucleus. A synthesis can take place only around a nucleus, around which the consciousness of the whole humanity will finally crystallize. In other words, if evolution follows very many lines, there must be a peak in which they must converge. And this peak, he calls "Omega Point."² Let us once more briefly consider what the attributes of the Omega Point are³. Teilhard de Chardin says that: (I) It must be already existing; (2) It must be personal - an intellectual being and not an abstract idea; (3) It must be transcendent; (4) It must be autonomous - free from the limitations of space and time; and (5) It must be irreversible, that is it must be attainable. He expressly states that in the Omega Point,

^I Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, New York, I959, pp. 237-238.

the human person and his freedom will not be suppressed, but super-personalized. Personality will be infinitely enriched.

The end of all evolution is thus something spiritual, the Spirit itself to which all things are called to unite at the end. As such, evolution appears as matter serving the spirit. From the cosmic, the biotic to the noetic, all things are converging towards the Spirit. He passes form hyper-physics to theology and revelation. He finds in the Gospels, especially in St. Paul's writings, a truly existing personal, transcendental, autonomous and irreversible centre of cosmic evolution. He says that Christ is the Omega Point, and in this all-embracing revealed perspective, he maintains that the Incarnation, Resurrection and the Ascension of Christ should be viewed not merely as historical events, affecting Christ only, but as cosmic events, affecting the whole cosmos.

6.2. The law of complexity and consciousness

The great factor in the evolutionary phenomenon as expounded by Teilhard de Chardin is the "great law of complexity and consciousness'. It is a law implying a structure, a converging psychic curvature of the world upon itself. This is called the metaphysics of union and fits well into the evolutionary conception of the cosmos. Evolution takes place along the axis of complexification - we pass from the relatively simple to the complex. Thus we pass on to atoms from atomic particles, from atoms to molecule and successively to molecular compounds, carbon compounds, viruses, cells living organism, plants, animals and finally man; briefly pre-life, life and thought.

Teilhard de Chardin asserts that all energy is of a psychic nature. But this fundamental energy is divided into two distinct components: a tangential energy, which brings together all the elements of the world in ever-increasing complexities, and a radical energy which draws it in the direction of a state even more complex and even more directed towards the future.

6.2.1. Matter and psychism

According to Teilhard de Chardin, matter and psychism were co-created. Just as man' s body goes back to some primordial matter, which has gradually evolved, so does his psychism or soul. The whole matter is permeated by the spirit, although this is not evident at all levels. The whole man, body and soul, thus emerged form matter. Just as matter evolves from the very beginning into a body that becomes more and more human, so psychism from the very beginning evolves into psychism that becomes more and more human. To put it in Teilhard de Chardin's own words:

We must accept what science tells us that man was born from the earth. But more logical than scientists when they lecture to us, we must carry the lesson to its conclusion; that is to say, accept that man was born entirely from the world, not only his flesh and bones, but also his incredible power of thought.ⁱ

The most revolutionary and fruitful aspect of Teilhardian metaphysics is the relationship it has brought to light between matter and spirit; spirit is no longer independent of matter and vice versa. It follows from this that spirit and matter are two facets of one and the same thing. This conception accords with Spinoza's conception of body and soul as not being two distinct substances as it is the case with Descartes. Man's soul and his body, the inside and outside, Teilhard de Chardin would say "within and without", have existed at all times. In Teilhard's words:

In the world nothing could ever burst forth as final, across the different thresholds, successively traversed by evolution which has not already existed in some obscure primordial way.²

^I Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The phenomenon of Man, New York, I959, p. I63. ² Ibid., p. I64.

6.2.2. The unity of all things

In the seeming myriad of entities around us, Teilhard de Chardin perceives a unity. His starting point is the fundamental initial fact that each one of us is per force linked by all the material organic and psychic strands of his being to all that surrounds him. Moreover, that unity reaches back in time and continues into the future:

If we look far enough back in the depths of time, the disordered anthill of living beings suddenly, for an informed observer, arranges itself in long files that make their way by various paths towards greater consciousness.^'

Teilhard de Chardin's research had already convinced him of the validity of evolution as a paradigm fundamental to understanding the meaning of human existence. He affirms that the belief that there is an absolute direction of growth, to which both our duty and our happiness demand that we should conform. It is the human function to complete cosmic evolution.² In I925, Teilhard de Chardin wrote in an essay entitled "Hominisation" where he brings out his conception of a human sphere:

And this amounts to imagining, in one way or another, above the animal biosphere a human sphere, a sphere of reflection, of conscious invention, of conscious souls (the Noosphere, if you will)³

^I Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Vision of the Past, London, I966, pp. 58-59.

6.3. The Internet as a Noospherical effect

Crucial to the process of human evolution, that is, to progress, is, in Teilhard's view, scientific research. In the past such investigations were isolated, sometimes no more than the hobbies of individuals. He says:

Today we find the reverse: research students are numbered in the hundreds of thousands-soon to be millions-and they are no longer distributed superficially and at random over the globe, but are functionally linked together in a vast organic system that will remain in the future indispensable to the life of the community.^'

One can't but think of today's "Internet," yet this was written forty-six years ago before the Internet came into existence. Indeed, Teilhard de Chardin was acquainted with the early forms of the key element in that "organic system." He writes,

And here I am thinking of those astonishing electronic machines (the starting-point and hope of the young science of cybernetics), by which our mental capacity to calculate and combine is reinforced and multiplied by the process and to a degree that herald as astonishing advances in this direction as those that optical science has already produced for our power of vision.²

Obviously Teilhard de Chardin had only a faint hint as to what was actually to occur. As far as the ultimate future is concerned, if evolution does in fact reach a final stage it will be the self-subsistent centre and absolutely final principle of irreversibility and personalisation: the one and only true Omega. As such, evolution finds its fulfillment only in the Omega point, point of universal convergence. It is this Omega point, as the Logos of Heraclitus, that harmonizes the forces of diversion and that gives

meaning to evolution in such a way that the cosmos is not gathering itself in a way that is haphazard, but in a way that is orderly, under the influence of the Omega point. It is this principle that inspires us with love, a love that is based on the giving of the self for the happiness of the other. It is only loves that unifies us by bringing us together despite our differences, despite our specificities. Love accepts diversity and does not seek unification but union. Through love, peoples, civilizations and cultures are able to come together to build the civilization of the universal.

In this way, evolution is meaningless if it does not aim at reaching the Omega point. In this way, evolution is impossible because love alone moves us to harmony, to communion and to solidarity. This is why Teilhard de Chardin exhorts humanity to build the earth by spiritualizing it with love. Love is the leit motive that pushes man towards woman and towards fellowman. The earth will be a better place to live in only when the force of love will surpass the forces of divergence, hatred and disorder. In this third millennium where conflicts are still the living bread of some peoples in some parts of the world, much still needs to be done. We need a new form of conviviality that takes into account the needs of the poorest and the weakest peoples in the planet, while at the same time controlling the destructive and exploitative acts of the richest and the strongest.

CONCLUSION

In light of developments such as computer bulletin boards and "super-information highways" like the Internet, Teilhard de Chardin's fantastic notions do not seem so fantastic. He is the unsung prophet of our collective future. It is time that we begin to look forward to what these developments are going to mean for us personally and developmentally. He says that Humankind is now caught up, as though in a train of gears, at the heart of a continually accelerating vortex of self-totalization. We need to consider how the inevitable changes in our nature are going to affect us as individuals, spiritually, psychologically, and socially. We can stop "groping about" in the dark, and take conscious control of our evolution to speed it on its way. We are, therefore, since the latter twentieth century, at the threshold of another great leap in evolution, the contraction and unification of the human species, the construction of the Noosphere, the focusing of our psychic energies. Teilhard de Chardin tells us that the age of nations has passed. Now unless we wish to perish we must shake off our old prejudices and build the Earth. The result of such a realisation is the Noosphere, towards which we are moving even now, via our cybernetic interconnections, whether we know it or not, like it or not, want it or not. As our consciousness of unity progresses, the standard of morality will eventually not be placed on the maintenance of private property, but upon the health of the Whole, the commonwealth which will become more and more perceptible to us as Noo genesis unfolds. Teilhard de Chardin himself admits that these perspectives will appear absurd to those who do not see that life is, from its origins, groping, adventurous, and dangerous. But these perspectives will grow, like an irresistible idea on the horizon of new generations. Indeed, it seems less and less absurd as this very process unfolds before us. Instead of despairing, humanity can, in all optimism, hope for a better future.

INTRODUCTION

Despite his rejection by the Catholic Church which considered him to be a threat to the integrity of the faith, Teilhard de Chardin's ideas were disseminated informally and sometimes secretly by friends and colleagues in the Church. He set the stage for the renewal movements which finally came to flower in the era of the Second Vatican Council. At the same time he also suggested a program for the reconstruction of science. He put forward a systematic critique of traditional science which was just as radical and just as provocative as his criticism of traditional religion, and he provoked equally extreme reactions in the scientific community. Partly as a result of these defensive and dogmatic reactions to Teilhard de Chardin, he is today tragically underestimated in both the religious and scientific communities. While many of his ideas have worked their way anonymously into currency and have been widely accepted, Teilhard de Chardin's innovative thinking has been taken seriously only by a minority of thinkers who see science and religion entering into a new era of cross-fertilization and creativity. For the vast majority, Teilhard de Chardin's thought seems marginal at best, and his insights are not studied in the depth they deserve. This is partially explained by the active suppression of his ideas by the Church and the suspicion of his ideas within the scientific community. However, Teilhard de Chardin's obscurity is also to be explained, by his own style of writing and his tendency to wander into the realm of pure speculation. Yet even in the face of Teilhard de Chardin's rejection by most of our teachers as not being a philosopher in the strict sense of the word, we think that his initiatives should be pursued. The questions raised by his work cannot be avoided. Anyone interested in extending the search for truth beyond the traditional frontiers of knowledge must wrestle with his basic affirmations. His humanism remains relevant for future generations.

Teilhard de Chardin throughout his writings invites humanity as a whole to build the earth. How we accomplish this is by correcting our errant perception of reality as being made up of separate units. He insists on the fact that to love is to discover and complete one's self in someone other than oneself, an act impossible of general realization on earth, so long as each sees in the neighbour no more than a closed fragment following its own course through the world. It is precisely this state of isolation that will end if we begin to discover in each other not merely the elements of one and the same thing, but of a single spirit in search of itself. The Teilhardian vision of the world is similar to the African vision of the cosmos. For Africans, to be is to be in relationship with nature, God, others and Being. One cannot think of existing alone; love has a communal dimension. The world for Africans, is not made of an aggregate of individuals, but of a communion of souls having a common destiny. We do not want to enter into the polemic of knowing if there is really a common vision of the world proper to Africans. Cheikh Anta Diop has written a lot on this in L'unité culturelle de l'Afrique noire. We know from him and from the African literature consulted, that there is an African spirit, an African way of relating to nature, to Being, to the Supernatural which is very different from the western vision of the world and this is what we are going to consider in this chapter, bringing out the similarities between the Teilhardian weltanschaaung and the African weltanschaaung.

7.1. The Negro-african vision of the world

The conception of reality by Africans is in many ways different from the way the Westerner views the world. Our attitude to life cannot therefore but be different from the western attitude to life. It is important to consider how the negro-African views reality in order to see why Senghor adopts and adapts the Teilhardian considerations on the Civilization of the Universal.

7.1.1. Being

When the Westerner considers reality as empirical, Africans look at being as dynamic. In effect, for the Westerner, everything can be tested and can be explained scientifically. He believes in empirical causality and seeks to know the material causes of things. He holds that a thing is what it is and not something else. He is more or less occupied with experience and bases his conception of reality on the law of non-contradiction, law of identity, law of the excluded middle, which are the basic principles outside which thought would be incorrect.

For Africans, Being is dynamic, not static. Father Placide TEMPELS in this light affirmed that for the Bantu, Being is force. It is concrete, real. As such, we are aware of the fact that there are causes and reasons that cannot be explained scientifically. Africans are aware of the fact that a thing can be itself and still be something else. We are not only aware of this, we live it intensively. Sometimes, our vision of things tends to defy the principles and categories of western thought. There is more to the world than what only the eye can see. We are engaged in the events and things that occur and we are involved in Being. Let us consider the illustration of Jude Thaddeus MBI on this point:

A tree falls and kills a man. The westerner would say there was an accident, a tree fell and killed a man. Then he would bring out his equipment and go to examine the tree. Perhaps he would discover that the tree was hollow inside. Perhaps, he would be able to establish that there was a storm at the time the tree fell. The man happened to be passing just at that

moment and so he got killed. To prevent this from happening again, he would, perhaps, decide to fell all trees within a certain distance from the highway.^I

Mbi continues by showing how Africans look at things in a way that is different from the western vision of the world:

He lithe westerner] doesn't think of praying about the matter. Our peoples, on the other hand, would look at the man. They would want to know why the tree fell on this man. For them this is not just a simple event. It is an occurrence that has meaning. God, the Ancestors, the spirits, other human beings come into picture. Relationship has been disrupted somewhere and this situation must be set right in order to prevent a repeat of this kind of occurrence. They would go for a nggambe man to find out the origin of this evil. Then they would offer sacrifices of appeasement and try to procure protection for the members of the family. They don't think of changing the physical conditions.²

These are two completely different approaches to the same situation. When the Westerner will stress on the material dimension of events, the African will stress more on the spiritual dimension of it. He will see spirits everywhere. Because Africans usually think and react the way they do, they are often condemned as being superstitious and illogical. After all, can we say that what is not known necessarily does not exist? Can we actually attribute the effectiveness of what is only to that which is known? Do we have the right to reject totally the African's understanding of being as dynamic? This will certainly lead us to the absolutisation of rationality in its scientific and technological form, the error of Positivism.

^I =ude Thaddeus Mbi, Ecclesia in Africa is us, Yaounde, 2004, pp.70-7I. [Author's emphases] The expression "nggambe man" refers to a soothsayer.

We suppose, therefore, that it is wiser to see the western vision and the African vision as complementary ways of being-in-the-world. The human being is both matter and spirit:

A purely rationalistic approach to reality, which takes account only of the materially demonstrable, can be just as lopsided as one, which sees spirit everywhere. It doesn't help the situation if we simply disregard and condemn. It would do a lot more good if we try to understand and move forward...^I

It is important to acknowledge our differences in the way we look at Being instead of trying to condemn one attitude or the other. The two visions are necessary in the construction of the Civilization of the Universal.

7.1.2. Nature

While western man studies nature to see what he can make out of it, we acknowledge on our part that nature holds mysteries. For us, nature is mysterious, we learn from it, we perceive the dynamism of being from it and this leads us to worship. The reverence that Africans give to nature points out to traditional religion. We perceive God in nature and we worship Him in and through nature. Nature is the ground for all our relationships:

Whereas Descartes would say, "I think, therefore, I am", we would say, "I relate, therefore, I am". I am because I am involved with other beings. Without relationship my being loses meaning and I cease to be. Where there is a breach in relationship I am bound to experience trouble, I find myself confronted with nonbeing.²

Nature involves us completely and we are part of it. From nature, we gain not only material goods, but also knowledge, religiosity and wisdom. If for the Westerner, what is artificial is meaningful and valuable, because it is the mark of his achievement and scientific spirit, for us, what is natural is meaningful and valuable because it is the sacred ground of our being. With our vision of the world, it is perhaps right to assert that we worship God naturally, the Most real Being in the most natural way.

Again, one great mistake which the foreigner is liable to make when he sees us gazing at nature is to say that we worship trees or stones. Africans do not worship trees or stones; it is a misunderstanding of the way we look at things. Our metaphysics is impregnated with religion. Africans are notoriously religious.

7.1.3. The World

The world for Africans consists of the physical reality, which we see. It is not a static reality but a dynamic reality, which opens up to the world beyond. The world both seen and unseen is one reality. In the world beyond, there is the realm of the nature spirits, both the good and the bad, and there is the realm of ancestral spirits: people who lived a useful life on earth go to where the ancestors are. They are blessed ones; they are productive even in the after-life since they are close to the source of life. They live in perpetual communion with the family and can bring assistance to those in the present life. They are venerated as Ancestors. Those whose life was unproductive on earth are damned ones; they remain unproductive when they die. They are "wandering spirits, they have no rest and they cannot be venerated as Ancestors.^;I

African ontology presents a concept of the world which is diametrically opposed to the traditional philosophy of Europe. The latter is essentially static, objective, dichotomic; it is in fact, dualistic, in that it makes an absolute distinction between body and soul or matter and spirit. It is founded on separation and opposition: on analysis

and conflict. The African, on the other hand, conceives the world, beyond the diversity of its forms, as a fundamentally mobile, yet unique, reality that seeks synthesis.

The African is, of course, sensitive to the external world, to the material aspect of beings and things. It is precisely because he is sensitive to the tangible qualities of things such as shape, colour, smell, or weight that he considers these things merely as signs that have to be interpreted and transcended in order to reach the reality of human beings. Thus, the whole universe appears as an infinitely small and at the same time an infinitely large network which emanates from God and ends in God.

7.1.4. God

For Africans, God is absolutely transcendent, far beyond everything. He is so great that even the Ancestors and the spirits do not "see" Him. Our Ancestors who have died are closer to God than we are and they can obtain blessings from God for us. Our parents are "God-for-us" in the hic et nunc since they are the ones through whom the life-giving power of God has been transmitted to us. We worship God as creator. A portion of sacrificial meal is always reserved to God. As Mbi says, "For Africans, God is in Himself male and female.~^I This is an expression of their awareness of the wholeness of God. God is complete, whole and needs nothing outside Him as man needs woman and woman needs man. This way of reasoning opens the way for an easy understanding of mystery.

7.1.5. Man

For Africans, man stands at the centre of the world and of being. In the created realm, man is the most important being; whatever exists exists for man and man exists for God. Man therefore is the reference point for any meaning in life. According to Father Jude Thaddeus Mbi, there are four types of human being: "the normal man, the

witch or wizard, the `rational animal' (a person able to transform herself into an animal), and the living dead, the Ancestors."^'

In our societies, people want but the 'normal man'. If signs of 'abnormality' are revealed, certain rites are carried on the baby or child in order to make him 'normal' again. This is one of the areas were faith in Africa is often tried. People are aware of the rites, or 'country fashion' which must be performed for their baby to be fine. Western Christianity has qualified these rites as pagan. Only the strong survive this kind of sore testing often at a great price. The majority would be in church in the morning and in the evening "take to witchcraft".^~ This area needs careful study so that a clear distinction may be made between legitimate tradition and witchcraft.

For Africans, human life is the highest good in the created order. Man's being is ordered to God because God created man for Himself. Man is God's property, God's food. You cannot question Him any more than you would question a man who takes a chicken from his poultry. This is how death is understood. The ancestors too belong to the human community, they are the living dead. Since they are mediators between God and us, we relate to them regularly through prayer, libation and sacrifice. It is for this reason that the veneration of Ancestors is considered to be the backbone of African traditional religion. Again, this is another area of sore testing for Christian faith. Once more, only the strong survive, often at a great price. The majority would be at the Eucharist in the morning and would be immolating a goat back in the compound later on in the day.

7.1.6. Time

Africans are well noted for not being time-conscious. Before blaming them further, we must understand what time is for them. They do not think of time in-itself: time is time for me. I do not count time, rather I experience it and I live it. Time is evaluated by what I do with it, what I achieve, what it offers me. The western conception of time is different:

The westerner, we could say, "counts" time. He pays attention to time units such as seconds, minutes, hours, etc. and programmes himself to follow these time units. He has invented the clock for this purpose. This again, follows from his "objective vision" of time-as-it-is. He has objectified time to the point that he can even buy and sell it as a commodity. "Time is money", he would say. This measured time is what the Greek calls chronos. By paying attention to time in this way the westerner has developed a linear conception of time. Time for him passes. What is past shall never be again. There is a linear progression and no unit of time past is repeatable.^I

When western man counts units of time, Africans pay attention to man and to events, trying to determine how time gets involved in order to enhance the being of man. Time is experienced time, not conjectured time. The Ancestors, for example, though dead are still living, they are still present; they have never left.

Africans' conception of time shows itself in the way they do things ordinarily. They are often blamed for being always late comers, not time conscious. Time is made for man and not man for time. Man is lord of time. So long as I achieve what I set myself to do, I am satisfied and the reckoning of time is not important. That is how Africans relate to time.

7.2. African and Teilhardian World Views

Senghor considers the African world as a communion of souls rather than an aggregate of individuals. When we consider Teilhardian metaphysics that we have considered in the first part of our work, we are struck by the resemblance between the vision of the world of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the African traditional vision of the world.

In effect, these visions of the world are characterised by totalizing harmonies. Thus, we might say that Teilhard de Chardin provides a framework within which a typical African philosophy for the future may be written. Like that of Teilhard de Chardin, Senghor's world view is personalistic, socialistic and humanistic, aiming above all at a unity or a totality in a dynamic communion of all beings among themselves and with the Omega Point, in a mutual embrace of love.

Unfortunately, the impact of western politics, of ideological conflicts and of power block diplomacy has weakened this basic unity. In addition, for Senghor, this communion of souls is most effective at the level of the fatherland or tribe and often breaks down into tribal conflicts at the level of the artificial States created by colonialism.

Reading Teilhard de Chardin, Senghor could therefore assert that the Negro-African society is better adapted than the western society to realize this communion of love needed for the building up of the Civilization of the Universal. According to Sen ghor, western man constructs artificial and therefore aggregates of 'human units', each of which remains closed within itself and seeks primarily self-sufficiency and independence. A union which comes from within, from the soul of a people which knows that individual man is not the measure of anything, that is, a union which, freely accepted as a vital necessity, runs a much greater chance of lasting success. Senghor adopts and adapts Teilhardian views on humanism to the African context and calls for the revalorisation of African traditional values that could enable Africa play a major role in the panhuman convergence towards the Omega point. Senghor then insists on the communal dimension of love in African society because love is the energy needed for the coming up together of all civilizations towards the fullness of love itself, the Omega point. In this chapter, we would like to show that there is a great similarity between the Teilhardian view of the world and the African view of the world and to bring out African humanism in the light of Teilhardian humanism.

8.1. The Negro-African role in the Pan - human - mobilism

The Negro-African race according to Senghor, acts as the spearhead of evolution because the black man's contribution to the human convergence should, on the basis of his traditional values, consist in forging the unity of man and the world by linking the flesh to the spirit, man to fellow man, the pebble to God, as he says:

K Le service nègre aura été de contribuer avec d'autres peuples a refaire l'unité de l'Homme et du Monde, a lier la chair a l'esprit, l'homme a son semblable, le caillou a Dieu ; en d'autres termes, le réel au surréel - par l'Homme non pas centre, mais charnière, mais nombril du monde. »I

The Negro-African's role in the human convergence is to lead all the other races and cultures towards the Omega Point. This appears clearly in Senghor's considerations of what is an ideal society, his insistence on the communal dimension of love in the African setup and in the contrast he makes between the African and the western world views.

8.1.1. The Ideal African Society

Senghor maintains that European society is primarily differentiated from the African one in that the former is at best a collectivist society that is bringing together into a collectivity a number of individuals who remain individual persons in a society. Western man distinguishes himself from the others and claims his autonomy to affirm himself in his basic originality. Senghor contrasts with the African society:

^I Leopold Sedar Senghor, Liberté I: Négritude et Humanisme, Paris, I964, p.38. The ne gro's service has been to join other peoples in rebuilding the unity of Man and the World, to link the flesh with the spirit, man to his fellowman, the stone to God; in other words, the real to the surreal - by Man not centre, but turning point or navel of the world.

African society on the other hand is a community: the African stresses more the solidarity of the group and the contributions and needs of the individual persons. This is not to say that the African neglects the individual person, but rather that he does not primarily conceive of the person as a member of a kind of "mystical body" in which alone he can achieve his full development, his originality and his total potential. Indeed, this community goes beyond even the human members, since it involves a communion with all beings in the universe: stones, plants, animals, men, dead (ancestors) or alive, and God.¹

Thus, while Karl MARX and other Marxists concern themselves with the economic infrastructures, seen as a mechanical and material processes, Senghor following Teilhard de Chardin, goes further into the roots of man's development and therefore is capable of looking towards the future. For him, the roots of man's development lie in the biological and psychological dimension of man himself, not merely as an individual. This leads to a growth in socialization for a better life by means of common search for the common good.

In order to achieve this better life, there is need for the dynamism of love. In this way, Senghor's ideal society is the African society, a society not characterised by individualism as is the case in western societies. The African family puts humanism at the centre of relationships. Here, relations are on the basis of a natural need to live in a stabilised family:

K Non seulement la famille est, chez les Negres, comme ailleurs, la cellule sociale; mais encore la society est formée de cercles concentriques de plus en plus larges, qui s'étagent les uns sur les autres, imbriques les uns dans les autres, et formes sur le type même de la famille. Plusieurs familles qui parlent le même dialecte et qui sentent une origine commune forment une tribu ; plusieurs tribus qui parlent la même langue et habitent le même pays peuvent constituer un royaume : enfin plusieurs royaumes entrent, a leur tour, dans une confederation ou un empire [...] C'est a l'etage de la tribu, plutot du royaume, que l'on peut saisir, plus nettement, la

¹ Léopold Sédar Senghor, in Ruch, E., (ed.), African Philosophy, Rome, 1981, p.233.

solution que le Negre a donnee aux problemes sociaux et politiques. Solution qui a repondu, par avance, a cette K unite pluraliste » qui reste l'ideal des humanistes d'aujourd'hui, de ceux du moins pour qui l'humanisme n'est pas une sorte de vain divertissement ' d'honnete homme' ».^I

The better life sought also depends on the way with which the problem of work and ownership is handled. This is often the source of many social problems. Every individual person must work in order to produce his own goods, to find happiness from and through the work of his hands. The error of capitalism, according to Senghor, does not lie on the existence of ownership or propriety, necessary condition for man's development; rather, it lies on the fact that in a capitalist society, ownership does not necessarily derive from work. Again, the Negro society proves its worth because here, work is considered as the only source of ownership. In effect, Senghor avers:

K Le vice de la societe capitaliste n'est pas dans l'existence de la propriete, condition necessaire du developpement de la personne; il est dans le fait que la propriete ne repose pas essentiellement sur le travail. Or, dans la societe negre, K le travail, ou, plus exactement peut-etre, l'action productive, est considere comme la seule source de propriete que sur l'objet qu'il a produit ». Mais -- les critiques du capitalisme l'ont souvent souligne -- la propriete ne peut qu'etre theorique si les richesses naturelles et les moyens de production restent entre les mains de quelques individus. La encore, le Negre avait resolu le probleme dans un sens humaniste. Le sol, de meme que tout ce qu'il porte -- fleuves, rivieres, forets, animaux, poissons -, est un bien commun, reparti entre les familles et meme parfois entre les membres de la famille, qui en ont une

^I Leopold Sedar Senghor, Liberte I : Negritude et Humanisme, Paris, I954, pp.28-29. Not only is the family for Negroes, as anywhere, the social cell; but also is the society formed of concentric circles more and more larger, which intermingle and which are formed on the very nature of the family. Many families which speak the same dialect and which have the feeling of a common origin form a tribe; many tribes which speak the same language and live in the same country can constitute a kingdom: finally, many kingdoms enter, in their turn, into a confederation or an empire [...] It is precisely at the stage of the tribe, or better of the kingdom, that we can perceive more clearly the solution that the Negro brought to social and political problems. This solution has helped in answering, in advance, to this "pluralistic unity" which remains the ideal of nowadays humanists, of those who at least consider that humanism is not a vain luxury of "honest man".

propriete temporaire ou usufruitiere. D'autre part, les moyens de production en general, les instruments de travail sont la propriete commune du groupe familial ou de la corporation. »I

We see with Senghor that there is a great sense of community in the negro-African society, which humanizes the relationships among all the members of the community. Even the ownership of agricultural products is collective since work itself is collective; so much that everyone has a vital minimum for his survival. It is a great advantage for all:

K minimum vital » selon ses besoins. K Quand la recolte est mare, dit le Wolof, elle appartient a tous. » Et cet autre avantage, non moins important du point de vue de la vie personnelle l'acquisition du superflu, luxe necessaire, est rendue possible par le travail, la propriete individuelle etant reglee et restreinte, non eliminee. »²

It is noticeable here that because of colonialism, this sense of the community, the common good, tends to disappear. Sen ghor's ideal society is therefore the precolonial negro-African society; a society full of values that need to be revalorized today and our dissertation aims, as we have seen, at calling the attention of Africans on the value of their traditions and at fighting the bad effects of colonialism which has helped in the loss of most of these values. Senghor's ideal society is a society having at its foundation, the dynamism of love.

^I Leopold Sedar Senghor, Op. Cit., pp., 29-30. The vice of the capitalist society is not in the existence of ownership, necessary condition of the development of the person; but in the fact that ownership does not essentially reside on labour. But then, in the Negro society, "labour, or more exactly, the productive action, is considered as the only source of ownership of the object produced". But -the critiques of capitalism have often underlined it - ownership can only be theoretical if the natural riches and the means of production remain in the hands of some individual persons. There again, the Negro had resolved the problem in a humanistic manner. The land, and all it contains -rivers, forests, animals, fishes-, is a common good, shared among families, which enjoy a temporary or usufructuary ownership of it. Again, the means of production in general, the instruments of labour belong to the family group or corporation.

² Id. Each individual person is materially assured of the "vital minimum" according to his needs. "When the harvest is ready, says the Wolof, it belongs to all." And this other advantage, not less important from the point of view of personal life: the acquisition of the superfluous, the necessary comfort, is made possible by labour because ownership is controlled and restricted not eliminated.

8.1.2. The Communal Dimension of Love in Africa

Senghor, who had personally experienced the sterility of hatred, opposition and isolation and had turned towards a synthesis which would bring men together rather than maintain them in a perpetual conflict, sees love as the highest form of human energy. Love achieves that totality and coherence, that communion which African myth has always and fairly effectively been seeking. This communion is achieved at three levels.

First, love brings man's individual acts into a unity of totality within the person himself. We are always tempted to act piecemeal, for the here and now. But if we consciously relate every one of our acts with the ultimate unifying goal, we thereby also think all acts among themselves and with the events throughout the universe.

Secondly, love totalizes us in the sense of making us aware of ourselves as persons. It is by loving others that we transcend ourselves and thus grow personally. This is not merely an external union like people sitting in the same room, but a communion of persons, like the love between husband and wife which enriches and ennobles both persons. Unless and until man learns to evaluate himself as a person, there is no room for growth in dignity.

Thirdly, humanity as a whole can only be totalized and given social cohesion through love. Any political system and any international organisation which relies exclusively on socio-economic techniques or on laws and police enforcement must fall unless love guides all those structures. It is based on structures to which man is subjected or on fear of which man's dignity is robbed. Sen ghor has this to say:

They sacrifice the part to the whole, the person to the collectivity. Since a materialist postulate underlies this, and since the collectivity is conceived solely as a technical organization, it does not attract (as love does); to push the

The communal dimension of love in Africa is mostly expressed in the way events are celebrated. An event is never one's event or one's family event: it is a celebration for the whole community or the whole village. A marriage for example engages several families: the family of the bride, maternal and paternal, as well as the family of the bridegroom, maternal and paternal. All are invited to celebrate the event, even those who are not directly concerned. The same holds true for other good events like First Holy Communion, Baptism and others. Bad events such as burials are also celebrated in a community spirit. All come together in order to comfort the bereaved family and in order to express their love and concern to the afflicted members of the community.

As such, Africa can inspire western man with this dimension of love because western society has come to be more individualistic and materialistic than the African society where solidarity and hospitality are values that have to remain despite the influence of the media and despite what has come to be the westernisation of the world.

Nevertheless, we cannot just place the negro-African contribution exclusively at the level of culture from his vision of the world. Africa has greatly contributed to the development of civilization and of science it is important to note this and to encourage scientific research and innovation in Africa.

In the light of the Pan-Human-mobilism, it is important to rebuild a certain self-esteem in the hearts and minds of Africans, by showing them that they have offered much to other civilizations and that they still have to work hard in order not to play a figurative role in the dialogue of civilizations. We acclaim the work of Cheikh Anta Diop in giving back to Africans a certain pride that could give them the momentum to strive to develop their civilization, referring back to ancient Egypt. It is clear from the

150 works of Cheikh Anta Diop that the contribution of Africa in sciences, in art, in religion and most of all in philosophy cannot be measured.

Léopold Sédar Senghor goes a step further, by showing that African civilization has been assimilated by the western world as from the end of the I9^th century. This is to show the important role that Africa has played so far in the dialogue of civilizations. Sen ghor avers:

epistemologique, scientifique, littéraire, artistique qui l'a marquee, l'Europe, l'Euramerique plus precisement, a commence d'assimiler les civilisations que l'on disait K exotiques ». Et celles-ci d'assimiler, inversement, la civilisation euraméricaine. Et l'on sait, pour m'en tenir aux arts en general, que, sans les vertus de la Negritude, ni la sculpture, ni la peinture, ni la tapisserie, je dis ni la musique ni la danse ne seraient ce qu'elles sont aujourd'hui : les expressions déjet, d'une Civilisation de l'Universel. »¹

In fact, the Civilization of the Universal consists in accepting one another in our values. It is a coming together to share what we have as valuable in our cultures. It proves once more that humanity needs each and every one of us. This passage of Sen ghor shows that the Civilization of the Universal is a process of assimilation of what is valuable in the other culture: Europe assimilating African values in art, music, dance, sculpture, arts in general and Africa on the other side, assimilating the values of European civilization. He then insists on the fact that without the value of the expression of African personality throughout the world, by means of arts, music, dance,

^I Léopold Sédar Senghor, Liberté III, Negritude et Civilisation de l'Universel, Paris, I977, p. 44. [...]Since the end of the I9^th century and the epistemological, scientific, literary and artistic revolution which marked it, Europe, Euramerica, more precisely, began to assimilate the civilizations which were considered as "exotic". And these latter inversely, began to assimilate the Euramerican civilization. And we know, just as far as arts in general are considered, that, without the virtues of the Negritude, neither sculpture, neither painting nor carpeting, I say, neither music, nor dance would be what they are today: the expressions already of a Civilization of the Universal.

sculpture, painting and so on, would not be what they are today: the expression of the Civilization of the Universal.

8.2. Senghor's African socialism

Senghor's African socialism relies on three pillars: an inventory of African traditional and cultural values, an inventory of western civilization and of its impacts on African civilization, and finally, an inventory of African economic resources, its needs and potentialities both material and spiritual.

8.2.1. African Traditional Values

In order to obtain an inventory of traditional African values, in Senghor's opinion, the study of the mythical past of Africa is crucial. For him, Africa is "rather a communion of souls than an aggregate of individuals".^I

Teilhard de Chardin had exhorted all cultures to converge towards the Omega point, through love and charity. In adapting Teilhard de Chardin, Senghor considers that the African world is much more adapted than the western world, to realize this communion of love. He considers the African's view of the world as a communion of souls, as the basis of the contribution of the African continent to the Civilization of the Universal. He then calls for a revalorization of African cultural values such as hospitality, solidarity and mutual love and concern.

8.2.2. Western Civilization and its impacts on Africa

The inventory of Western civilization and its impacts on Africa can be drawn from the effects of colonialism on cultural patterns of behaviour of the African. The aim of this inventory is to produce a 'dynamic symbiosis=¹ among several cultures, neither of which should dominate the others; since all are complementary. We can point out here the Inferiority Complex and the Split personality in the African.

8.2.2.1. The Inferiority Complex in the African

According to Kenneth KAUNDA "the humanistic character of the African has been damaged and even partly destroyed by Africa's long exposure to the West."² Colonialism has introduced into Africa many attitudes that could not be naturally integrated into the existing traditions.

Thus, while Europe opened new vistas of freedom by freeing Africans from disease, ignorance, superstition and even from slavery, it also introduced a new form of servitude which arises from the Inferiority Complex of the African vis-a-vis the technically superior Europeans.

Similarly, while colonialism brought a new security by introducing the rule of law against the arbitrary power of chiefs and brought technical and economic developments which make man less dependent on nature, it has also robbed the African traditional security which he found in his tribal ties and in the old social web of relationships.

² Kenneth Kaunda, in Ruch, E., (ed.), African Philosophy, Rome, I98I, p. 238.

Finally, while it introduced a broader horizon into people's life by making them look beyond the limits of their villages, and by bringing about new associations: political parties, churches, trade unions, and so on, it has also brought to many people a new form of loneliness arising from urbanization and from the rootlessness of detribalized existence.

Despite these side effects of colonialism, the African himself, at least partly, still carries the blame of his inferiority complex and his split personality. We agree with Sen ghor that the African has to fight against the inferiority complex and that colonisation has helped in forging this complex in the Negro; but we will not totally free the Black man from the guilt of forging in himself the inferiority complex because despite the side effects of colonialism, the African himself worsens the situation of this inferiority complex and split personality. In this light, Ferdinand CHINDJI-KOULEU affirms:

K Le Negre doit prendre ses responsabilites devant l'histoire. L'innocenter comme le fait le mouvement de la negritude, c'est le rendre passif, et par consequent, c'est lui rendre un mauvais service. Rejeter toutes les fautes de la colonisation et de l'esclavage sur l'homme blanc seul, c'est continuer a cultiver le mythe du Negre-bon-enfant, incapable d'acceder au statut adulte. L'esclavage des Noirs a ete rendu possible par les Africains eux-memes, car ils ont accepte de vendre leurs freres. Et la faiblesse de leur technologie a permis la colonisation. »¹

^I Ferdinand Chindji Kouleu, Negritude, philosophie et mondialisation, Yaounde, 200I, p. I28. The Black man actually has to face history and to accept his responsibilities. To free him from all blame as the negritude movement does is to render him passive, and by so doing, to render him a bad service. To reject all the faults of colonisation and of slavery on the white man alone, is to continue cultivating the myth of the Negro-good-child, unable to reach the adult state. Instead of pushing the blame on the slave trader or the coloniser, he has to acknowledge that he is, at least partly, responsible for his inferiority complex because slave trade was also made possible by Blacks who accepted to sell their brothers, and colonisation was just the fruit of a weak technology.

Inferiority complex reflects itself in Africa even in the domain of economics. In our markets, in order to sell an item at a high price and more easily, some sellers go as far as writing on locally made or even manufactured articles: 'made in England', 'made in Italy', or 'fabrique en France', 'fabrique au Canada', 'made in USA' and so on. This will attract those who feel that God was so unjust that He created them Black Africans and those who feel that their culture is inferior and who spend their lives desiring with all their might to go to the above-mentioned countries and others. This situation is described by Ebenezer Njoh-Mouelle.^I

We thus notice that the elite contributes a lot in the formation of the inferiority complex in their fellow brothers and this is why one would prefer to buy items that bear the stamp of a foreign trade mark.

In the light of the pan-human-mobilism, each culture, each race has to preserve its identity when seeking unity with others. Africans are therefore called upon to remain what they are, think as Africans, speak as Africans and act as Africans; while at the same time accepting those values that will enhance their identity and not lessen it. To contribute to the building up of the Civilization of the Universal, we need to accept our culture first, then choose what is good in other cultures and inculcate such values in an African personality, not trying to become like Europeans or Americans. Let us acknowledge our identity as Africans and value it.

8.2.2.2. The split of personality in the African

The Negro also carries the blame of his depersonalisation because he always strives to be someone else, not himself. According to Frantz FANON, such a striving is a tragic and forlorn illusion. Fanon insists:

The black man wants to be white. The white man slaves to reach a human level...For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white...but the white man is sealed in his whiteness, the black man in his blackness.^'

It is thus true that we cannot find our identity by dreaming of becoming what we are not, by escaping from our identity. Even though caused by racism and colonialism, the inferiority complex in the African can be solved through a change in mentality. What we ought to fight is the attitude of not accepting one's own identity as black. In effect, Aime CESAIRE observes that the Negro-African tends to reject himself and his whole ancestry which has made him into what he is. Let us listen to Cesaire's expression of this denial of self:

In effect, nobody can give another man an identity; one cannot even help him to find it; it is something personal: by helping him, one only succeeds in making him find a spurious identity, one which is and remains an appendix of that of his "benefactor". One can only remain oneself by oneself. Albert LUTHULI gives a similar point of view when he says:

^I Frantz Fanon, Black skin, white masks, Great Britain, I970, p. I2. ² Aime Cesaire, Return to my native land, Paris, I97I, p. II0.

It was no more necessary for the African pupils to become Black Englishmen, than it was for the teachers to become White Africans...I remain an African, I think as an African, I speak as an African, I act as an African.^I

With much more regret, Ebenezer NJOH-MOUELLE deplores this sorrowful state characterising the underdeveloped African. He presents the underdeveloped African as someone who is disorientated.²

In effect, the underdeveloped African is mentally and culturally disorientated and this leads to his depersonalisation. It portrays a lack of self-identity in the African, an inferiority complex vis-a-vis the European and the American cultures. In fact, the African is neither himself nor is he a European or an American; he suffers form a duality which affects his inward self.

Underdeveloped Africa is in fact full of people wearing masks. Most Africans do not want to accept their culture as Africans and at the same time, unfortunately, they cannot be what they want to be. Most Africans feel that they have a culture which is inferior to that of Westerners.

Moreover, most Negroes who have lived in Europe and returned to their original environments convey the impression that they have added something to themselves, or that they have completed a cycle in their lives. They return literally full of themselves. Some cannot even speak their vernacular; they do not even want to listen to it and forbid it in their homes. This is because they want to feel superior; they think that the European culture is the best. Even those who have never travelled by plane or by sea claim to appreciate Western cultures locally, through the intermediary of boasting elite, television and other forms of media. This is reflected in the way young people dress, the

^I Albert Luthuli, cited in Ruch, E., (ed.), African Philosophy, Rome, p. I97.

157 type of films they enjoy, the type of music they like to listen to and to dance. Most of them consider the fact of speaking their vernacular very shameful and even when they speak English or French in public, they will endeavour to change the tone of their voices in order to imitate the white man's accent.

As a result of his inferiority complex, the African develops a split personality. This reflects itself more especially in African leaders as Kaunda points out: "the modern African leader is a split personality between two ways of thought...between heart and head."^' This schizophrenia extends to the masses. In effect, the problem lies in the mentality of the African. Frantz FANON observes: "the Negro behaves differently with a white man and with another Negro; and this self-division is a direct result of colonialist subjugation."²

8.2.3. African Resources

Africa is a continent blessed with a lot of natural resources. Due to poor technical and economic development, these resources are and have been exploited by the West. Sen ghor thus insists on the spiritual and cultural resources of Africa.

The foreign contributions, whether capitalist or socialist, whether from the West or from the East, must be taken cognizance of and be adapted to the African cultural and economic realities. Neither western nor eastern, nor African civilization is the universal civilization. Africa has something to offer in the process of collectivisation of mankind. The Hegelian and other racist attitudes are therefore wrong:

The Negro-African is not finished before he even gets started. Let him speak; above all, let him act. Let him bring like a leaven, his message to the world in order to help build the Civilization of the Universal.³

^I Kenneth Kaunda, in Ruch, E., (ed.), African Philosophy, Rome, I98I, p. 238.

³ Léopold Sédar Senghor, in Ruch, E., (ed.), African Philosophy, Rome, I98I, p. 226.

Following the steps of Teilhard de Chardin, Senghor acknowledges the complementarity of human races and cultures. According to Sen ghor, the Negritude movement

[...] welcomes the complementary values of Europe and the white man, and indeed of all other races and continents. But it welcomes them in order to fertilize and reinvigorate its own values, which it then offers for the construction of a civilization which shall embrace all mankind. The neohumanism of the twentieth century stands at the crossroads where the paths of all nations, races and continents meet, where the four winds of the spirit blow.^I

Above all, the search for the Civilization of the Universal must not become an excuse for introducing a new cultural colonialism. This implies an independence of the mind, which is the necessary prerequisite of other independences: political, economic and social; that is, the right and the possibility of thinking for oneself, of choosing values for oneself, of acting by oneself and of being oneself. Such independence must imply not merely the rejection of the former colonial rule as being the absolute culture, but also of any other culture or value system which has not been fully integrated into that of one's own people. Every man is part of a social context: he has a country, a colour, a history and a civilization.

8.3. The revalorisation of African traditional values

In view of the panhuman convergence, we consider that there should be a black consciousness among Africans, the recognition and the desire to establish a community feeling among Africans. All this demands African solidarity. Africans should, as a people, share not only their material wealth, but also their spiritual values, their joys and their sufferings.

^I Leopold Sedar Senghor, in Ruch, E., (ed.), African Philosophy, Rome, I98I, pp. 226-227.

The traditional African heritage of placing the community over individual interests gives them a great advantage over Western cultures in the process of building up new solidarity structures to replace the obsolete ones. In this way, because of these values of solidarity and love, Senghor could assert that African cultures are more likely to help in leading others towards the Civilization of the Universal.

Kenneth KAUNDA gives us the following characteristics that shape the personality of the African:^I

-He enjoys meeting and talking with people for their own sake and not merely for what they are doing, what class they belong to or for their productive usefulness.

-He is patient with trials and is used to his dependence on Nature. He is forgiving and his anger usually does not last long. This is shown graphically in the speed with which he has overcome his resentment at having been for so long under colonial domination. He does not, at least generally, keep a grudge against Whites for having degraded him for so long, provided of course that Whites respect him and his human dignity.

-He loves rhythm, music and dance, all of which are physical expressions of man's life force. Emotion actually characterises the Negro-African.

-Finally, the African is an inveterate optimist: his contact with and faith in people lead him to believe that in the long run, he will succeed in whatever he does.

^I Kenneth Kaunda cited in Ruch, E, (ed.), African philosophy, Rome, I98I, p. 238.

These characteristics of the African form a much more natural basis for humanistic attitudes than the life style of Europe and America, where machines and gadgets, the time-clocks and statistics, the political structures and the ideologies are often more important than the people at whose service they ought to be used.

With regard to the necessity of revalorising African cultural traditional values, Negritude will appear as an ideology aiming at fighting cultural dependence built by colonisation and neo-colonialism. This is what Pius ONDOUA expresses in the following words:

K Les faits sont clairs: la colonisation et sa perpetuation a travers la neo-colonisation ont instauré l'.re de la dependance culturelle. C'est donc dans le cadre de cette dependance culturelle et dans le but de liquider cette dependance que surgit l'idéologie du socialisme-negritude de L. S. Senghor. L'auteur a d'ailleurs pris soin de reconnaitre que l'Europe, en propageant en Afrique, sa civilisation rationnelle, scientiste, matérialiste et athée, avait désorganisé la society traditionnelle negro-africaine Ken tarissant les sources mêmes de sa civilisation ». »¹

As such, Negritude encourages the revalorisation of African cultural values, because of the bad effects of colonialism which enhanced cultural dependence on the colonial master.

^I Pius Ondoua, « Le Socialisme-Negritude de L.S. Senghor - Notes critiques » in Annales de la Faculte des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines, Yaounde, I988, p. 26. The facts are clear: colonisation and its perpetuation through neo-colonisation have established cultural dependence. It is therefore within the context of this cultural dependence that emerges the ideology of the socialism-negritude of L.S. Senghor. The author even acknowledges that Europe, while propagating its rational, scientist, materialistic and atheistic civilization in Africa, disorganised the traditional negro-African society "by drying up the very sources of civilization".

Teilhardian humanism appears as the humanism of the third millennium. It presents a form of conviviality among different peoples, cultures and civilizations of the planet that takes into account the specificities of each individual people, culture and civilization. In fact, amidst a civilization that disregarded the negro-African race, Teilhard de Chardin could still advocate for humanism, giving more consideration to those civilizations that were considered as inferior. This chapter aims at evaluating the humanism of Teilhard de Chardin. A priori, humanism cannot be something negative; as such, it becomes difficult to criticize this thought that placed the human person at its centre, considering man as a phenomenon just as the universe itself. Nevertheless, Teilhardian humanism takes its roots on his theory of panhuman convergence which needs to be evaluated because it appears as an irresistible and unconscious phenomenon. His optimism also needs to be evaluated so as to see whether it is reliable, realistic or merely utopical. It is to this task that we are going to consecrate this last chapter of our work.

9.1. The panhuman convergence: a reliable hypothesis

The theory that there is a human synthesis seems indubitable and it is taking place gradually as days and centuries go by in the universe. Teilhard de Chardin himself is aware of this fact and he asserts:

The hypothesis that a human concentration is taking place is satisfactory therefore because it is utterly coherent with itself and the facts. But it also possesses the second sign of all truth, that of being endlessly productive. To admit, in fact, that a combination of races and peoples is the event biologically awaited for a new and higher extension of consciousness to take place on earth, is at the same time to define, in its principal lines and internal dynamism, the thing that our action stands most in need: an international ethic.^'

We need to admit the fact that there is a coming together of human races and of peoples in order to appreciate that which humanity needs most: an international ethics. This international ethics is what we have been considering in a wider context as the Civilization of the Universal, the convergence of all human races towards the Omega Point. Teilhard de Chardin is himself conscious of the fact that this phenomenon calls for no detailed description:

It takes the form of the all-encompassing ascent of the masses; the constant tightening of economic bounds; the spread of financial and intellectual associations; the totalisation of political regimes; the closer physical contact of individuals as well as of nations; the increasing impossibility of being or acting or thinking alone - in short, the rise, in every form, of the Other around us.^'

Hence, we are now in the phase of planetisation. "The age of Nations is past, says Teilhard de Chardin, the task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the earth."³ We will build the earth by humanizing it, by spreading love, mutual acceptance and mutual

recognition and by spelling away the forces of division, hatred, racism, ethnocentrism and xenophobia.

9.2. The panhuman convergence: against westernisation

The Teilhardian panhuman convergence implies that all cultures, all civilizations and all peoples should keep their specificities in order to converge together towards the Omega Point. In this way, no culture, no civilization or people should pretend to be the universal culture, civilization or people so as to dominate the others, considering them as inferior. It is on the basis of ethnocentrism and racism that western man went to Africa to civilize the negro-african who was considered by some philosophers such as HEGEL, ARTHUR DE GOBINEAU, GUERNIER, LEVY-BRUHL and even HEIDEGGER as an inferior human being characterised by irrationality and a prelo gic mentality which could not enable him philosophise.

In order to be able to speak about a synthesis of all human races, then differences and specificities among cultures and civilizations should not be broken down so as to reach a sort of standardized culture. Yet, nowadays, globalisation just appears as the westernisation of the planet. Western culture is being imposed in some parts of the world in the name of media power.

In an article entitled "Globalisation or Westernisation?" Godfrey B. TANGWA criticises this instinct of domination of western civilization on other civilizations, thus westernising the world instead of making it a table of dialog, a rendez-vous of giving and receiving. In effect, he begins by defining globalisation in these terms:

Globalisation, as a descriptive process, has been made possible and inevitable by advances in science and technology, especially in loco-motion and communication technologies. The net result of these advances has been increased contact between the various peoples and cultures that populate the world. Thanks to this state of affairs, the world is today, unlike yesterday, aptly described as a `global village'. This villagisation of the world should have as one of its logical consequences the slow but sure transformation of the world into a `rainbow village', by analogy with our appellation of South Africa, in our optimistic moments, as the `Rainbow Nation'. Resistance to this aspect of the process of globalisation, exemplified in the savagery with which persons from some parts of the globe are sometimes forcibly excluded from some other parts, cannot but create a lot of tension within the process. Modern technology, in general, and locomotion and communication technologies, in particular, are, of course, inventions of the Western world which have been very effectively used, inter alia, in colonising and dominating peoples in other parts of the world.^'

And he goes further to point out the risk of westernisation in the global village when he asserts:

Globalisation, as a prescriptive process, arises from increasing awareness of both the diversity as well as interdependence of the various parts, peoples and cultures of the world. Globalisation in this sense, is essentially a moral concept. Underlying such blueprints of globalisation as the Biodiversity Convention and the Human Genome Project, are clear ethical impulses, concerns and imperatives. But between globalisation as a descriptive process and globalisation as a prescriptive ideal, there is a difference which involves the danger that globalisation

might end up as or, in fact, might not and never has been more than, mere Westernisation, given the history and reality of Western industrial-technological power, colonisation of non-Westerners, domination and insensitivity to all things non-Western.¹

The spirit of omnivorous discovery which the Industrial Revolution engendered and made possible in Europeans guided them to all parts of the globe where they discovered peoples and cultures so different from theirs that they felt reluctant to qualify them as 'human'. From then on, Europeanisation (Westernisation) of other peoples and cultures appeared naturally in their eyes as humanisation and civilisation. It is in this way that both altruistic and egoistic motives became mixed and confounded in the relationship between the technologically very advanced Western world, peoples and culture and other (technologically less advanced) worlds, peoples and cultures.

Since the Industrial Revolution, technology has been propelled to great heights by Western commerce and the profit motive, by war and the will to dominate, by pure epistemological and scientific curiosity, as well as (occasionally) by the altruistic urge to improve human wellbeing. In this process, Western culture has developed the penchant for patenting, monopolising and commercialising any of its so-called discoveries and a nach for spreading and promoting its ideas, vision, convictions and practices under the guise of universal imperatives of either rationality or morality which ought to be binding on all human beings who are sufficiently rational and moral.³

Indeed, Europeanization is to be fought because it is founded on the will to power of the western world, technologically developed, and based mainly on egoistic

166 motives marginalising the third-world, less technologically developed, in the dialog of civilizations. As a bioethician, TANGWA goes a step further in expressing the enduring danger of Westernisation at the level of biotechnology, thus affirming inter alia:

Today, biotechnology, an aspect of Western industrialized culture, is capable of manipulating or modifying the genes of living organisms. This raises many ethical problems, some relating to biodiversity and the environment in general. Bioethics owes its own development to awareness of the seriousness and magnitude of these ethical problems which cannot leave any culture indifferent, no matter its own level of technological development. Africa, for instance, which presents remarkable biodiversity, against the background of which human values and attitudes different from those of the Western world have developed, cannot be indifferent to the problems raised by biotechnology. It is possible for global ethics to emerge, provided globalisation does not simply translate in to Westernisation.^'

Placed in the midst of Western and African values, modern negro-African is called to remain himself, accepting what is good in the western world and at the same time valorising still the virtues of African cultural values. Leopold SEDAR SENGHOR then appears as an example to follow for Africans who tend to lose their identity or their personality because of the influence of the western world. This is also one of the aims of our work, to fight against the inferiority complex, the dual personality and the depersonalisation which is gaining ground in the lives of most young Africans. They are called to go back to their cultures in order to know them, in order to live them and in order to express them while discerning between good and bad foreign values, accepting what is good in other cultures and rejecting what is wrong. They should, for example, accept the benefits of the scientific culture, avoiding technophobia, and at the same time, they should reject practices such as abortion, homosexuality or the changing of sex which are becoming part of daily life in Europe and America. Also, they are called to

fight against superstition, which is developed and expressed in African traditions, and avoid practices such as excision, which is still found in some cultures.

The Teilhardian panhuman convergence seems to be an unconscious and irreversible phenomenon and this leads us to some conclusions: first, because it is an unconscious phenomenon, it does not depend on us. Whether we want it or not, we are embarked in a phenomenon that encompasses us and that is beyond our control. In this way, there would be no effort needed on our own part to build the earth by spiritualisin g it with love. If we are unconsciously moved towards the Omega Point, then do we need to strive to come together? Are we not in the same determined world of the Stoics who had to live according to nature in order to find their happiness? If humanity decides to occasion wars in several parts of the planet for peoples to kill themselves, is the panhuman convergence still going to take place?

Secondly, if as Teilhard de Chardin says, the panhuman convergence is an irreversible phenomenon, then, there is nothing humanity can do or needs to do about it. There seems to be one choice left to us: cooperate in this coming together or be dragged by force. Where is the place for human freedom of will and of choice? Is the Teilhardian conception of the collectivisation of humankind still compatible with human liberty? Are men not free to refuse to unite or to come together in synthesis towards the Omega Point?

It is essential to consider these questions which enable us to clarify our understanding of Teilhardian conception of panhuman convergence. In fact we think that in the phenomenon of panhuman convergence, there is still a place for human freedom. This is why Teilhard de Chardin considers that

It seems more and more evident that only one thing is capable of bringing us victoriously past these (...) perils. The sole event to be hoped for at the point of Hominization that we have reached is the appearance in the world of a psychic flux (impulse, passion, faith, etc.) powerful enough to reconsolidate in freedom, both with themselves (on the individual scale) and with one another (on the planetary scale) the emancipated multitude of human molecules. And it is here that the dynamic value (one might say the value of salvation) of an awakening of our minds to the enormous phenomenon of human convergence comes into sight.^'

Thus, Teilhard de Chardin does not exclude freedom in the phenomenon of human convergence; but he believes in man, considering him as a whole phenomenon, placing him at the centre of convergence through what he calls Hominisation. Man is capable of spiritualisin g the earth by spreading love at a planetary scale. It is this optimism that keeps us wondering, when we know that man has proven to be, even in this century, dangerous for fellow man.

9.4. Some limits to Teilhardian optimism

Teilhard de Chardin is conscious of the fact that the optimistic attitude that he invites humanity to have towards the future is a paroxysm of hope against hope, because for him, there is no energy of despair but there is energy of hope which is love and he asserts:

If progress is a myth, that is to say, if faced by the work involved we can say: `What's the good of it all?' our efforts will flag. With that the whole of evolution will come to a halt -- because we are evolution.²

² Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, New York, I959, p. 23I. In the footnote of this page, Teilhard de Chardin declares that there is no such thing as the 'energy of despair'. He invites us to be optimistic to the end founding our optimism on a paroxysm of hope against hope. All conscious energy, according to him, is, like love, (and because it is love), founded on hope.

We want to question this type of hope against hope and this all-out optimism because the world community seems not to have learned from the miseries of the first and second world wars. This is because, in this 2I^st century, we have witnessed and we keep on witnessing a number of wars and conflicts: Irak, Afghanistan, Birmania, Darfour, Georgia and Goma in Congo. Many innocent people have died and Iran is still menacing to develop its nuclear bomb in order to challenge the United States of America and the other countries considered as the most powerful countries in the world because they own the atomic bomb.

It seems to us necessary to impose some limits to Teilhardian optimism because nothing seems to assure us that the world is not going to be destroyed before the panhuman convergence finds its fulfilment when it reaches the Omega Point. The Omega Point is just a postulate which seems to be coherent as far as Teilhardian metaphysics and Teilhardian humanism are concerned; yet, we cannot blindly abide to this optimism because violence seems to be the ruling principle of human relationships not only at a military level, but also in economy and politics.

When some political and economic measures are being taken in order to impoverish the poor and to enrich the rich, then there is violence. When some parts of the international community, better, when some members of the planetary village are suffering from hunger, when innocent people are being killed every day as they try to resist to rebels in some parts of the village, then there is violence. The evil of omission seems to characterise our generation and this can only lead us to be afraid about the future.

We cannot hope against hope for a better future if measures are not being taken in order to protect the weaker ones and in order to protect the environment, our common biosphere. When the most polluter refuses to attain a summit organised in order to see how to reduce global warming or global pollution, how optimistic should we be?

Optimism is an attitude, a state of mind, a vision of the world that lays emphasis on the positive opportunities while neglecting the negative situations that occur or that may occur; yet, as presented by Teilhard de Chardin, one needs to be a superman to abide completely, body and soul, mind and heart to his optimism. The current state of our planet which appears as a post-industrial jungle with all the characteristics of an animal jungle imposes some limits to the Teilhardian postulates about the future. Nothing at all assures us that the world is not going to be destroyed before humanity reaches the Omega Point. We remain optimistic but to a certain extent.

CONCLUSION

Humanism is an idea with a global reach. It has originated in most diverse forms, wherever men and women began to reflect upon what and who they are, just because a human being is a human being. In a world in which leading ideologies write and talk about the coming "clash of civilizations", Teilhardian humanism is about the capacity and the need for humans to understand and to recognize their differences of cultures and traditions. In a world full of resentful religious and cultural fundamentalisms, Teilhardian humanism is about tolerance and the dissolution of all claims to impose upon others how they should chose to live or believe. In a world which is ever more polarized between rich and poor people, between rich and poor countries, Teilhardian humanism is about realizing the equal right of every human being to sufficiency, in accordance with the generations of human rights articulated since the UN charter. In a world in which leading powers are waging war without respecting the UN, Teilhardian humanism is about finding and implementing a way of banning war as an instrument of politics. Within African society, with its problems of mass unemployment, poverty and under-financing of public infrastructures and social security systems, Teilhardian humanism is about renovating the social compact and redefining the capability of the political community, in order to find a way of overcoming these problems in a way which is compatible with the effects and requirements of the rendezvous of the giving and the receiving. Teilhardian humanism goes a step further. It is not only centred on man; but also on the earth, on our planet. His humanism invites a sense of reverence and responsibility for all the variety and wonder of life on this planet. It allows us to see our lives and spiritual destiny as intimately intertwined with all the rest of life on earth. We are part of a network of life dependent on the rest of this living planet for our own survival. Teilhard de Chardin's concept of a cosmic spirituality is very relevant for a debate on the protection of the environment. Twenty-first century humanism must be able to embrace the planet and not just the people on it.

10.1. Panmobilism and optimism, substantial interconnection or Teilhardian interconnection?

Panmobilism, as stated in the general introduction of our work, refers to the movement of all things. It all begins with Heraclitus who asserted that all things are in perpetual flux and in perpetual conflict. For him therefore, Panmobilism only introduces destruction, instability and conflict. As such, he was pessimistic.

On the other hand, Teilhard de Chardin considers that the movement of all things, all civilizations, all cultures and all peoples is not a desperate one; it is full of meaning, full of hope and full of perspectives for the future of mankind. This is because Panmobilism has a goal, it has an end and this end is the Omega Point, the fulfilment of evolution. Instead of being pessimistic as Heraclitus, Teilhard de Chardin is optimistic and considers that all things necessarily move, they necessarily converge and they converge towards the Omega Point. Despite the apparent conflict which saddened Heraclitus and which it saddens us to see, Teilhard de Chardin invites us to keep on hoping in a better future, all these conflicts, all these destructions, all the hatred are a necessary stage for the advent of a civilization of the Universal.

Hence, Panmobilism and optimism are not linked by nature. One can hold the theory of Panmobilism and be pessimistic and this, as we have just seen, is the case of Heraclitus; whereas one can be optimistic while holding on the theory of Panmobilism and this is the view of Teilhard de Chardin. Panmobilism and optimism become interconnected in a meaningful manner only in Teilhardian humanism. His humanism is based on optimism, and his optimism takes its roots on his metaphysics which is a metaphysics of convergence and totality, all things converge in accordance with the ancient panmobilist theory of Heraclitus which we have decided to use in order to describe the Teilhardian metaphysics.

10.2. The actuality of Teilhard de Chardin

The actuality of Teilhard de Chardin could be considered in relation to the conception of science today. Accepting the complexity of science, he actually moves us to perceive the urgency of a total synthesis of the sciences today. This is what Paul-Bernard GRENET expresses when he says:

K Le merite de Teilhard est d'avoir apercu l'urgence d'une synthese totale des sciences. Intellectualisme, universalisme, esprit de synthese, - voila des qualites que les besoins et les habitudes de notre temps risquent de nous avoir fait perdre. Teilhard peut nous guerir de ce g technicisme » qui nous destine a g faire », et non a contempler ; de ce K pragmatisme » qui nous borne a un horizon accessible ; de cet esprit de g specialisation » a outrance qui nous met des ceilleres [...] Il est un certain nombre de realites, ou de verites, ou tout simplement de notions que Teilhard pour son compte a retrouvees, et qu'il nous invite a recuperer d'urgence. »¹

There are indeed many realities and many truths that the thought of Teilhard de Chardin urges us to recover despite the spirit of technicism, pragmatism and specialisation which characterises our times.

10.3. The Panhuman convergence: Myth or Reality?

The Teilhardian panhuman convergence lays down the principles of the interaction of civilizations, the dialogue of cultures. Above all, in a world which is convergent and fast becoming a planetary village, it is difficult to conceive such a village without the chief of the village. This is why the Teilhardian theory appears unrealistic and even as a utopia. It remains an ideal as the war of classes in society will never end, it will continue to change in form: master/slave, bourgeois/servant, the western world/the

^I Paul-Bernard Grenet, Teilhard de Chardin ou le philosophe malgré lui, Paris, I960, p. 3I. The merit of Teilhard is to have perceived the urgency of a total synthesis of sciences. Intellectualism, universalism, spirit of synthesis, - these are some qualities that the needs and the habits of our times might have lead us to lose. Teilhard can heal us from this "technicism" which induces us to "do", and not to contemplate; from this "pragmatism" which narrows us to an accessible horizon; from this spirit of "specialisation" which gives us lenses [...] There is a number of realities or truths, or simply notions, that Teilhard on his part regained and that he invites us to recover in all emergency.

third world. The first words of the Manifeste du parti communiste of KARL MARX describe this situation of inequalities in society, which appear to be natural. In the rendezvous of giving and receiving, there are certainly many inequalities but this is not the end, much could still be done in order to build a dialogue which is not only balanced, but also just.

In the final analysis, although it may seem utopical and unrealistic, the panhuman convergence has been gradually taking place in our days under the form of globalisation. Teilhard de Chardin, from his examination of the past as a geologist and palaeontologist, could postulate this movement of totalisation. In Europe, it has been taking roots: cultures are becoming aware of their duties towards one another. The European Union is an example of unity in diversity. In Africa, much still needs to be done as far as the African Union is concerned. SENGHOR has raised our awareness to the fact that through our traditional values, we have something to offer in this process of the Civilization of the Universal. Nevertheless, his Negritude movement proves to be mostly theoretical because it seems to overlook the present situation of Africa, the challenges of our days: poverty and underdevelopment. Despite this fact, this movement remains meaningful. Any important action must arise from an ideal or an ideology. Our work is just an attempt to consider the complementarity of civilizations, showing that no civilization is supposed to consider itself as the universal civilization. There is no civilization be it African or Western which is to claim superiority over others, all civilizations are called to come together in synthesis acknowledging their differences and admiring reciprocally their values. This is why as we condemn abortion and homosexuality legalised in most of the Western rich countries, we also condemn excision which is still practised in African countries in the name of tradition. Our world today seems to be running fast towards its westernisation, through the ideology of neoliberalism in politics and economy, destabilising poor countries. The world certainly needs a better form of globalisation, one which respects the sovereignty of States, their autonomy and their specificities. in this vein, Hubert MONO NDJANA asserts:

K La leçon est donc entendue, a savoir la nécessité d'échapper a l'hégémonie occidentale. Non en toute spontanéité et en toute inconscience, mais en connaissance de cause : pour reconstruire l'identité perdue de l'Afrique et la faire entrer ainsi, en parfait équilibre, en toute indépendance et en toute souveraineté, dans la civilisation du Troisième millénaire. » 1

10.4. Towards a change in the mentality for a new conviviality

It is not unusual in our Cameroonian society to remark that people are still discriminating between Anglophones and Francophones; that they are still insisting on ethnological differences: Beti and Bamileke; and even between religious differences: Muslims and Christians, Catholics and Presbyterians. Not only do they insist on these differences, but also do they use these differences to judge and classify people. This is a situation that needs to be transcended. We need to consider, as stoic philosophers used to affirm, that we are all citizens of the world and that the universe is our fatherland. There is a need for a profound change in the mentality in Africa and more especially in Cameroon where ethnic differences are usually arguments for discrimination. As stoic philosophers used to affirm, Man is a microcosm of a macrocosm. The world belongs to Man because Man is one as the world is one. Differences exist but we do not need to insist on them to judge people. People should be judged on their values and on their merits.

The examples of Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president who does not have French but Hungary origins, Angela Merkel, the political leader in Germany, Hellen Johnson, the political leader in Liberia and Barack Obama, an afro-american elected to be the president of the United States of America, are thought-provoking because they prove that our origins, our sex and our specificities should not be an impediment to our

^I Hubert Mono Ndjana, Beauté et vertu du savoir, 8leçon inaugurale), Yaounde, I999, p. I39. The lesson is then understood, that is, the need to escape from the western hegemony. Not in all spontaneity and in all unconsciousness, but in all awareness: in order to rebuild the lost identity of Africa and in this way, to bring it, in perfect equilibrium, in all independence and in all sovereignty, into the civilization of the third millennium.

intrinsic values. What makes a man is the values that he defends and that can inspire fellow man positively.

The age of races, the age of families, the age of tribes has passed. We need to build the earth through humanism and Teilhardian humanism which places human value, considering man as a phenomenon, is very relevant for today's world. There is therefore a need for a new form of conviviality, a conviviality that does not found human relationships on profit but on human value because man is an absolute value in the midst of economic, political and other values.

I. WORKS OF TEILHARD DE CHARDIN

-The Phenomenon of Man, Wall, B., (tr.), New York, Harper & Brothers Publishers, I959, 3I8 pages.

-L'Energie Humaine, Paris, Seuil, I962. -L'Activation de l'Energie, Paris, Seuil, I963.

-Building the Earth, Lindsay, N., (tr.), New York, Dimension Books, I965, I26 pages.

- Christianity and Evolution, New York, I97I. -Les Directions de l'Avenir, Paris, Seuil, I973. -Le Cceur de la Matiere, Paris, Seuil, I976.

-The Vision of the Past, Cohen, J.M., (tr.), London, Collins, I966, 286 pages.

-Ecrits du temps de guerre (1916-1919), Paris, Bernard Grasset, I975, 448 pages.

II. WORKS ON TEILHARD DE CHARDIN

Teilhard de Chardin, prophete d'un Christ toujours plus grand, Bruxelles, Lessius, 2005, 280 pages.

III. GENERAL WORKS

-La mondialisation de l'economie, 2. Problemes, Paris, La Decouverte, (4^e ed.), 200I, I27 pages.

La philosophie politique de Leopold Sedar Senghor, Paris, L'Harmattan, 200I, I44 pages.

Cahier d'un retour au pays natal,-Return to my native land, Emile SNYDER, (tr.), Paris, Presence africaine, I97I, I55 pages.

Plato and Parmenides: Parmenides' Way of Truth and Plato's Parmenides, Indianapolis, I939.

Civilisation ou barbarie, anthropologie sans complaisance, Paris, Presence africaine, I98I, 526 pages.

-L'unite culturelle de l'Afrique noire, Paris, Presence africaine, 2^e edition, I982, 220 pages.

La fin de l'histoire et le dernier homme (I992), Denis-Armand Canal, Paris, Flammarion, I993, 454 pages.

- Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of view (I784), Lewis White Beck (tr.), New York, The BobbsMerrill Co., I963.

- Fondements de la metaphysique des mceurs (1785), Jacques Mu glioni, (tr.), Paris, Bordas, I988, I9I pages.

Mondialisation financiere et terrorisme --La donne a-t-elle change depuis le 11septembre ? Paris, Enjeux planete, 2002, I75 pages.

The Parmenides, Constance C. Meinwald, (ed.), London, Oxford, I99I, I92 pages.

IV. ARTICLES OF REVIEWS AND COMMUNICATIONS

« Identite culturelle, civilisation de l'universel et mondialisation », in Le siecle de Senghor, Actes du colloque international des 16 et 17 avril 2003 a Yaounde, Yaounde, Presses universitaires, 2003, pp. 43-52.

« Le socialisme-negritude de L.S. Senghor, notes critiques #, in Annales de la Faculte des Lettres et sciences humaines, series sciences humaines, Vol. IV, no.I, Yaounde, janvier I988; pp. 3-36.

-« Cosmocitoyennete et Ideologie chez Habermas, une critique africaine de la mondialisation neoliberale. # Communication aux premières rencontres philosophiques internationales

"Globalization or westernisation? Ethical concerns in the whole bio-business", paper prepared for the Fourth world congress of bioethics, Tokyo, 4-7 November, I998, in Bioethics, vol.I3, no.3, july I999, pp.2I8- 226.

VOUNDA ETOA, M. (ed.), international des 16 et 17 avril 2003 a Yaounde, Yaounde, Presses universitaires, 2003, 200 pages.

V. DISSERTATIONS

VI. WEBSITES

ChangeX......15, 16, 17, 18, 44, 50, 54, 55, 69, 85, 111, 120, 122, 155, 157, 173, 175, 203

Civilization v, 8, 27, 32, 48, 50, 73, 81, 82, 86, 90, 99, 106, 108, 130, 149, 150,

61, 62, 65, 67, 69, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 86, 89, 90, 117, 118, 123, 129, 143, 144, 158, 161, 162, 163, 167, 168, 169, 172, 173, 174, 204, 207

144, 150, 151, 152, 154, 156, 158, 159, 161, 163, 164, 165, 166, 171, 172, 173, 174

DestructionX v, vi, 8, 9, 10, 11, 58, 71, 87, 93, 94, 95, 96, 172, 205
DifferencesXXXXX.10, 11, 27, 45, 67, 69, 72, 73, 111, 115, 116, 130, 137, 163, 171, 174, 175

EarthXXXX 28, 79, 96, 98, 122, 125, 131, 134, 162, 171, 177
EvolutionXXXX..v, 10, 12, 37, 52, 54, 55, 63, 65, 66, 92, 99, 117, 119, 121,

FutureXXX.v, 10, 11, 14, 45, 53, 54, 55, 56, 62, 68, 70, 71, 73, 74, 75, 77, 81, 83, 85, 86, 92, 93, 95, 98, 120, 122, 126, 128, 129, 131, 133, 142, 145, 168, 169, 170, 172

HESIODXXXX.
HOMERXXXX

Hominisation

HopeXXXX.

HOTTOIS, G.

Human races

Human relationships

Human value

HumanismX

HumanityX..

Humankind..

HUME, DX.

HUNTINGTON, S.P.

HUSSERL,EX.

HUXLEY, J.

IdentityXXX

Inferiority complex

InternetXXX

JANSSENSXX..

KANT, IXXXX

KAUNDA, K.

KOPP, JXXXXX.

LEVY-BRUHL, L.

LiberalismXXX..

LIBERMAN, J.

Life

LINSCOTT, M.

Lo gosXXXXXX.

18,

48,

16,
16,
49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 57, 59, 80, 128,

110, 181,

v, 9, 10, 11,

v, 34, 48, 63, 118, 124,

74,

67, 68, 181,

30,

11, 31, 32, 33, 77, 80, 81, 99,

v, vi, 92, 94, 101, 118, 129, 131,

26, 27, 112, 113, 181,
152, 157, 159,
179,
163,

104, 106, 107, 181,
42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 54, 61,
77, 179,
v, vi, 9, 17, 18,

192 192 168 53 192 72 76 109 171 125 131 192 192 192 192 74 154 206 117 192 192 192 192 102 192 179 192 129

Man..............11, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 58, 60, 62, 65, 66, 69, 70, 74, 77, 79, 80, 81, 83, 85, 90, 93, 99, 103, 107, 109, 112, 123, 124, 125, 127, 139, 140, 141, 144,

162, 168, 174, 175, 177, 178, 207
Mankind..........v, 8, 14, 24, 25, 26, 31, 33, 63, 70, 71, 75, 78,		80,	85, 86, 87,		90,
91, 92, 98, 99, 103, 107, 116,	157, 158, 172
MBI, J.T.............. 135,	136, 137, 138, 139,	140,	141,	181,	192
MONO NDJANA, H.					175
Morality..............	27, 70, 73,	110,	131,	165,	204
MOUNIER, E.				113,	192
Movement...........v, 8, 9, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 26, 27, 28, 52, 55, 81, 85, 86, 90, 99, 120, 122, 153, 158, 172, 174		61,	63, 65, 67,		69,
Ne gritude...... 144,	146, 150, 153, 158,	160,	174,	180,	181
Ne gro............74, 135, 142, 143, 144, 146,	147, 153, 154, 155,	157,	159,	206,	207
Ne gro-african				135,	206
Neoliberal ideology		v, 9,	101,	104,	116
NIETZSCHE, F.				55,	193
NJOH-MOUELLE, E.		154,	156,	181,	193
Noo genesis....... 10, 38, 50, 54, 60, 61, 62, 63, 66, 83,			122,	131,	204
Noosphere....... 38, 49, 50, 51, 52, 56, 58,	60, 61, 80, 83, 121,	122,	128,	129,	131
Noospherical effect				129,	206
Omega point 11, 18, 27,	69, 77, 82, 83, 121,	129,	130,	143,	151
OMGBA, R. L.				81,	193
ONDOUA, P.	iv, 115, 160,			182,	193

OneXXXX..12, 15, 16, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 57, 58, 72, 93, 96, 109, 129, 134, 155, 172, 203

SENGHOR, L.S. .8, 11, 12, 81, 116, 135, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 153, 157, 158, 159, 160, 166, 174, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 193, 207

UnionXXX 12, 15, 18, 31, 37, 41, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 67, 70, 75, 79, 86, 88, 90,

72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 88, 92, 99, 116, 118, 123, 128, 131, 142, 144, 146, 148, 154, 174, 203, 204, 206

Acknowledgement.XXXXXXX..XXXXXXXXXXXXXX.XXXXXXXXXXXXXX..iv AbstractX.XXXXXXXXXXXXXX...XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX..v RésuméX.XXXXX..XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.XXXX.....................................vi OutlineXXXXXXX...XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.XXXXXXXXXXXXXXvii

0.2. Method of studyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX...X...XXXXXXXXXXXXXX9
0.3. ClarificationsXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX...XXX...XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXII

2.I. The Teilhardian methodolo gyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX....XXXXXXXXXX..X.29 2.I.I. A Phenomenology of the UniverseXXXXXXXXXXXX....XX 29 2.I.2. Convergence and ComplexificationXXXXXXXXXXX...XXXX.......................3I 2.I.3. The Within of ThingsXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX...XXX.XXXXXXXXXX..34 2.I.4. Beyond Phenomenolo gyXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.XX..XXXXXXXXXXXX 35

2.2.3. The Noetic: the beginning of thou ght...................................................................46 2.2.4. The Christic: the fulfillment of all.........................................................................53 2.2.4.I. Omega: the unity of the multiple......................................................................57 2.2.4.2. Cosmo genesis and Noo genesis..........................................................................60

2.3. The Christo genesis......................................................................................................63 2.3.I. Cosmo genesis and Christo genesis..........................................................................64 2.3.2. Christo genesis and the Parousia.............................................................................66

3.I. For a racial morality....................................................................................................70 3.I.I. Unity in unanimity.................................................................................................7I 3.I.2. Unity in diversity....................................................................................................72 3.I.3. Unity and not identity...........................................................................................74

3.2. The point of universal convergence...........................................................................77 3.3. The Psychosocial evolution and the hyperpersonal organisation .............................80

CONCLUSION 83

5.I.I. Air pollution.........................................................................................................96 5.I.2.Water pollution.....................................................................................................96 5.I.3. Global warming....................................................................................................98 5.2. Globalisation: The Spirit serving Matter ...............................................................I00 5.2.I. Globalisation and mercantilism..........................................................................I0I 5.2.2. Globalisation and neoliberalism.........................................................................I02 5.2.3. Globalisation and deshumanisation...................................................................I06 5.2.3.I. Globalisation and human rights.....................................................................I07 5.2.3.2. Human rights crisis.........................................................................................I08 5.2.4. The value of the human person..........................................................................II0 5.2.4.I. The current crisis of values..............................................................................II0 5.2.4.2. The foundation of human value.....................................................................II2 5.3. Teilhardian Evolution: Matter serving the Spirit................................................... II7 5.3.I. A spiritual phenomenon......................................................................................II8 5.3.2. Creation as a continuous process........................................................................II9

7.I. The Negro-african vision of the worldXXXXXXXX.XXXXXXX.......................I35 7.I.I. BeingXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX....................................I35 7.I.2. NatureXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.I37 7.I.3. The worldXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX...................................I38 7.I.4. GodXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX...XXXXXXX...XXXXXXXXXXXXXX..I39 7.I.5. ManXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.XXXXXXXXXXXX.I39 7.I.6. TimeXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX...XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.I4I 7.2. African and Teilhardian World Views XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX..XX...XI42

8.2. Sen ghor's African socialism .....................................................................................I5I 8.2.I. African traditional values.....................................................................................I5I 8.2.2. Western civilization and its impacts on Africa....................................................I52 8.2.2.I. The inferiority complex in the African............................................................I52 8.2.2.2. The split of personality in the African.............................................................I54 8.2.3. African resources..................................................................................................I57 8.3. The Revalorisation of African traditional values.....................................................I58

I0.I. Panmobilism and optimism, substantial interconnection orXXXXXXX..XXI72 I0.2. The actuality of Teilhard de Chardin XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.XXX...I73 I0.3. The Panhuman convergence: Myth or Reality?.....................................................I73 I0.4. Towards a change in the mentality for a new convivialityXXXXXXXXXXX...I75

INDEX,,,,,,,,,,,..,,,,.,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,...,.184 APPENDIX I..,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,.,...,,..,,,,,,,.191 APPENDIX II,,...,,,,,,,,,,,,...,,,,,,,,,..,.....................192